ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 980 DirectCU II OC Overclocking Results

Using the ASUS GPU Tweak software, we began as ever by pushing the power and temperature limits to their maximums, 125 percent and 91°C in this instance.

Using these settings, we added 200MHz to ASUS's own frequencies, resulting in a base frequency of 1,378MHz and a boost clock of 1,479MHz. This is a 17 percent increase, or 22 percent compared to stock cards. The actual boost frequency in games jumped from 1,291MHz to 1,504MHz, which is a 16 percent increase. Anything higher resulted in crashes in games almost immediately, and no voltage increase would alter this, so we left the card's voltage at its default settings. Even so, this is a great result – the card has more overclocking headroom than the default frequencies suggest.

The Strix GTX 980 was almost stable with its memory running at 7.8GHz effective, but we noticed some artefacting after a few minutes of testing, so we dropped to 7.7GHz which resolved the issue. This 10 percent increase gives the card a new memory bandwidth of 246.4GB/sec. It's also in line with what we've seen elsewhere. Every GTX 980 and GTX 970 card we've seen uses the same Samsung memory chips, and all of them have managed effective speeds of either 7.7GHz or 7.8GHz.