GeForce GTX 780 3GB Overclocking

Having already had plenty of success with overclocking GTX 780's big brother, GTX Titan, we had a rough idea of what to expect here. However, GTX 780 surpassed our expectations and proved to be a phenomenal overclocker. Raising the power threshold to 106% and temperature threshold to 96°C in EVGA's Precision X, as well as increasing the core voltage by the maximum allowed 32mV, allowed us to add 160MHz to the boost curve, increasing the base clock to 1,023MHz, the guaranteed boost clock to 1,050MHz and the actual peak boost clock to 1,150MHz. This represents a 15 per cent increase over stock. The card was happy to run at this speed for prolonged periods of time and while the card's fan did become much more audible, temperatures only rose by a few degrees, peaking at 82°C.

We were also able to crank the memory frequency up to a mighty 1.75GHz (7GHz effective), a 16 per cent increase that resulted in peak memory bandwidth of 336GB/sec.

These are both hefty overclocks to a card that's already a lot faster than GTX 680 and not-far off GTX Titan. The result was performance that surpassed that of GTX Titan in both Unigine Valley and Battlefield 3 at 2,560 x 1,600. Of course, Titan overclocks similarly well, but the fact that we were able to push Nvidia's £550 GPU up to the performance of its £850 Titan is sure to irk those who invested in Titan. For 780 adopters though, it bodes extremely well.