To discover our sample’s overclocking abilities we used EVGA’s Precision X software and began raising power and thermal thresholds to the maximum allowed and then increased the voltage also to the maximum permitted. Then using Unigine’s Valley benchmark we began stability testing.
Based on our previous history with overclocking the GM-206 core we knew that MSI had left lots of potential for consumers to discover. Sadly we also knew that a lot of this potential would never be realized because of NVIDIA’s hardset on voltage. To be blunt this insanely good heatsink really is overkill for what you will be able to do with this card, and you will run out of voltage before you run into thermal walls.
On the positive side even when heavily overclocked this card was still damn quiet and rather cool running! In fact, it allowed this card to not only hit our new higher boost setting but basically stay there without being thermally limited. Really, truly pheonimnal cooling is what the Gaming 2’s Twin Frozr V offers.
Also on the positive side, the GM-206 inside our sample Gaming 2 had more untapped potential than the PNY Elite OC sample. This in turn allowed us to hit 1492 on the core. Put another pay we found an additional 213Mhz for the core, for a grand total of 314Mhz overclock. Now that is a sweet overclock.
Better still is our RAM was also able to be pushed to 7920Mhz effective rate. This too was a bit better than what our PNY Elite OC was able to do, but this combination of faster RAM and insanely fast core allowed for noticeably better frames per second. In fact, the higher overclock translated to better real world performance gains than the Elite OC. This is why we have included its ‘overclocked’ results in the charts as well. Its just a shame that consumers have to manually do this to get class leading performance. Then again doing that is not exactly what we would call a hardship and considering this card is only $6 more than what reference card costs is just icing on the cake.
