To discover our PNY GeForce GTX 980 Pro 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.
Thanks to its already heavy factory overclock we were not expecting to get much more out of the Maxwell core. In fact we were hoping to wring a tiny bit more out of it but expected the most gains to come from the memory side of the equation. While yes we did indeed get the RAM speed up to an effective 7.8GHz (or 11.3% over a reference 980 or 8.3% over the 980 Pros default 7200Mhz), the big surprise was on the Maxwell core and not the memory.
Pardon the pun but we were blown away by what the 980 Pro was able to do. Obviously some of this impressive overclock comes from the custom heatsink and fans, but most come from the fact that PNY do heavily binning to their cores before choosing which ones to use for their ‘Pro’ model. Specifically we boosted the maximum speed to a whopping 1535. This is 15.5% boost in performance over what the 980 Pro comes with from the factor and a massive 26.2% over reference clock speeds. Put another way we were able to get an extra 600Mhz on the ram and 206MHz on the core. Considering that this card only costs $30 more than a reference card we can’t imagine ever buying a stock 980 again.
