Overclocking

We spent a fair while overclocking the Asus Matrix GTX285. The plethora of settings meant we had to do it justice. Unfortunately the iTracker 2 utility proved to be less than up to the task. While it was able to do everything it should, each time things went a bit too far, usually with a 'video driver has been recovered' message, the software refused to start again requiring a full system reboot. This meant overclocking, while rewarding, was a pretty long and drawn out affair.

We started with the timings with the aim of carrying the best settings through to when we started playing with the frequencies. Strangely, Asus' performance setting with tighter timings, failed to provide any kind of increase in performance. With that in mind we then turned our attention to whether the OC setting which relaxes the timings, allowed for higher overclocks.

Indeed it did, with our memory limited to 2,754MHz effective with the default timings while the OC setting allowed us to raise this to a stonking 2,820MHz effective which is even higher than the water cooled BFG Tech GeForce GTX 285 H2O we looked at a while back. Given more time we're fairly sure we could push it further and it would be interesting to see what it would be capable of with water-cooling although finding a block to fit around all those extra nobbly bits might prove difficult.

To get there we also had to raise the memory voltage from 2.05V to 2.08V. We also managed a core speed of 740MHz and a shader clock of 1,660MHz requiring a GPU voltage increase from 1.15V to 1.18V that also saw the load temperature rise by 5°C. These were enough to see a three to four fps improvement in Crysis across the board, edging ever closer to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB and way ahead of the vanilla graphics card.