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.
As with the PNY GeForce 980 Pro, we went into the overclocking stage of the Elite OC with rather lowered expectations. This is not because the Elite OC’s custom cooler and fan solution is bad; rather it is because PNY has already given the Elite OC a rather high factory overclock. With such little headroom left, we expected the only real gains to come from the memory side of the equation.
Unlike the PNY 980 which did surprise us with a wealth of untapped potential, the GM206 core proved to be already near at its stable maximum settings. To be precise we were only able to boost the speeds from 1367MHz to 1390MHZ – or a mere 1.7%. On the surface that barely seems worth the effort, and we should be disappointed with this result. However, we are actually impressed with the Elite OC as it just shows that PNY are offering customers basically all the performance their GM206 cores have to offer. Sure you may get 1-3% more performance (we have seen GM206’s hit in the low 1400’s) but for twenty dollars they are not only doing all the hard work for you, but are also guaranteeing this new level of performance.
On the memory side of the equation PNY still left a ton of room. In what seems almost like routine we easily hit an effective speed of 7,900MHz. To put that another way we found 12.7% of untapped potential in these Samsung ICs. Equally important this raised the memory bandwidth from a rather anemic 112.16GB/s to a better 126.4GB/s. This boost is what is mainly responsible for the additional frames per second improvement.
