Let’s start with the new way of doing things. OC Scanner is basically the same idea as software ‘one click software overclocking’ of your CPU that comes for free with your motherboard. I.E. it works pretty well but do not expect to get the most from your card… even if does take about 20 minutes to complete. Instead it simply is a nice little boon for novices who do not know enough to get the most from their video card. If you feel you are in that camp… run it first to get an idea of what your particular card is capable of… and then use that as your starting point. For example, with OC Scanner our sample got to a stable 1880Mhz core boost. As NVIDIA is very gun shy on memory overclocking it will not touch the default of 14GHz. This too is much like most motherboard manufactures ‘automatic’ CPU overclocking software.
That certainly is a decent boost of performance, but certainly does leave a wee bit to desired. With some effort, and time, we got this exact same card – that OC Scanner said was only good for 1880 range – to 1950Mhz. Also with tweaking, and keeping thermal management into consideration, this still left room for us to tune the memory from a brisk 14,000MHZ to 14,952MHz. At this combined level of overclocking the fans are spinning… briskly and are noticeable, but overall it still is not what we would classify as a ‘loud card’.
Things do become a bit trickier when thinking about long term overclocking. Firstly, we would be hesitant to put this smaller card, with ‘smaller’ fans under such a constant load 24/7/365. The amount of data out there is simply too limited for this first-generation card to be overly aggressive on the long term overclock. No one except NVIDIA board design team and maybe certain AIB partners have anything remotely resembling ‘long term’ data. As such for 24/7/365 we would dial things back on both the memory and boost settings. For this card we would probably set it to about 1900MHz on the core and 14.5GHz on the memory… and then revisit it after six months of constant (ab)use.
As a mining card, well the results do speak for themselves. Overclocking is the only way to get this GeForce GTX 1080 priced card to give GeForce GTX 1080 levels of mining performance.
