MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning 6GB Overclocking Results

MSI's excellent Afterburner utility is perhaps the best GPU tweaking software around. Using it, we set the power and temperature limits to their maximums of 122 percent and 91°C respectively.

We were only able to add 40MHz to the base clock before we began to see artifacts – even ramping the GPU voltage to the maximum wasn't enough to prevent this. Still, a base clock of 1,240MHz is nothing to be laughed at – it's 24 percent above stock and in line with most other GTX 980 Ti cards that we've seen. We kept this overclock steady with 44mV extra voltage but probably could have achieved a more efficient overclock with more time. The boost clock at this speed was 1,344MHz, but in actuality the card was peaking at 1,420MHz.

The memory stayed stable at 8GHz effective, which is an increase of 0.9GHz or 13 percent. We applied an extra 25mV here as well – the Afterburner utility with this card lets you control the core, memory and aux voltages independently, with the latter reserved for LN2 situations.