Overclocking
To discover our PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8 4GB 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.
We really did have high hopes for this card and while there is still some headroom to be found, we did walk away a bit disappointed by this PNY XLR8’er card. In the past PNY XLR8’s never let us down and provide ample amount of overclocking headroom. Sadly, because PNY did cut corners on the cooling solution this 970 will actually thermally limit itself long before you reach the actual physical limits of the Maxwell architecture. This is a shame as it is such a cool running chip, but the blower is basically only good enough at keeping a stock 970 cool. Hopefully at some point PNY will release an ‘OC’ or ‘OC2’ version that negates this cooling problem and allows for some insane overclocks.
On the positive side we did manage to reach a peak of 1328MHz -or 150Mhz over the factory ‘stock’ setting. This is an additional 12.7% of free performance that really will not take all the much effort to unlock. On the memory side of the equation we were able to boost the memory to an effective 7600Mhz, which is a 8.4 percent improvement over the card’s default 7010Mhz setting. This increase in GPU and memory performance does translate to a couple extra average frames per second and an a additional frame or two on the all-important minimum frames per second scale.
