Almost two weeks have passed since we announced the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, but the card finally hit the market last Friday, and a few specialized outlets decided to find out how far this hardware can be pushed — in other words, to wring out its overclocking potential. Even at stock settings it has everything it needs to claim the top step of the podium, but there are plenty of situations where a higher clock speed delivers tangible benefits.
It's not an easy decision to make, to say the least. If you just spent 699 dollars on a graphics card, the last thing you want is to cause trouble with reckless overclocking. But times have changed, and manufacturers are well aware that users are going to squeeze every last drop out of their hardware, like an orange. Tolerances are greater, and cooling solutions are more robust. That brings us to the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, a huge step forward over the standard edition. Recent benchmarks put it, on average, 28 percent higher at 1440p, and an impressive 32 percent at 4K. Now... what about overclocking?
The test setup
The folks at PC Gamer ran a few tests that we'd consider moderate: they raised the power limit to the maximum allowed 120 percent, added 175 MHz to the core, and 500 MHz to the GDDR5X memory. To compensate, the fan was locked to a static 80 percent. Depending on the load, Nvidia tries to keep the fan spinning as slowly as possible to cut noise, and in its normal configuration the temperature can climb past 80 degrees Celsius. If you're willing to accept more noise, those numbers will come down significantly. Honestly, 1080p tests are already anecdotal given the raw power of cards like the 1080 Ti and CPU bottlenecks, so the benchmarks focused on 1440p and 4K.
The results
With the 120% / +175 / +500 combo, performance improves by 8 percent at 1440p, and 10 percent at 4K — enough to make the difference between a perfectly acceptable experience and the always-wanted 60 FPS. The titles that benefited most from overclocking were Doom (20 percent increase) and GTA V (9.5 percent). Dishonored 2, Far Cry Primal and Gears of War 4 managed to cross the 60 frames-per-second barrier. On the other side of the street, Civilization 6 (whose optimization is dreadful) showed no benefit from overclocking, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided only gained four frames per second. We'll stop here and imagine what the 1080 Ti will be able to do once liquid cooling enters the equation.
PC Gamer
