Galax GeForce GTX 970 EXOC Black Edition Overclocking Results

In MSI Afterburner, we set the power limit and temperature limit to their maximum values; 125 percent and 91°C.

With that done, we were able to increase the base clock all the way to 1,345MHz (1,497MHz boost), which is a 180MHz increase (15 percent) over the shipped frequency and a huge 28 percent faster than the reference clock speed of 1,050MHz. It's also 30MHz more than we managed with the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G, making this GTX 970 the best overclocker we've seen yet. While the boost clock is rated at 1,497MHz, in actuality the card boosted to between 1,545MHz and 1,560MHz under load, which is at least 40MHz higher than any we've seen before, and 110MHz more than the Asus and EVGA cards from our initial roundup – it's an excellent result.

Our experience with the memory was also great. All GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards so far have managed a respectable 1.925GHz or 1.95GHz, but here we finally have a card stable at 2GHz (8GHz effective), a 14 percent increase over stock. The card was even bench-stable at 8.1GHz, but a few artifacts here and there meant we had to drop it down a notch.

Here are the results of the card when overclocked in a selection of our benchmarks: