Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Overclocking Results

We used the latest version of MSI Afterburner to overclock the GTX 980, as we found it to have the best compatibility with the new chips and it's very easy and clear to use.

We began by maxing out the power and temperature limits to give us the maximum amount of headroom possible. These values were set to 125 percent and 91°C respectively.

After our session of trial and error, we finished on a stable base clock of 1,327MHz, giving us a rated boost clock of 1,416MHz. In practice, the card was happily boosting to between 1,425MHz and 1,450MHz, which is an incredible feat for a reference GPU, and shows just how much headroom Maxwell really has. The 200MHz base clock increase is a tasty 18 percent boost. We fed the GPU with an extra 40mV in Afterburner to keep things stable at these speeds.

This healthy core overclock was joined by a solid memory overclock too. The eight Samsung memory chips were happy to run up to 7.8GHz, an excellent figure for chips only rated to 7GHz in the first place – we've never yet managed to break the 8GHz point, so we can't ask for much more here.