PNY GeForce GTX 980 OC2 Pure Performance 4GB Overclocking Results

The card offers the usual power and temperature limits of 125 percent and 91°C respectively. With these at the maximum, we set about our business.

In spite of the all-inclusive cooling solution and 10 power phases, the overclock we managed wasn't all that impressive compared to other partner GTX 980s. We reached a final base clock of 1,338MHz (+110MHz) for a boost clock of 1,439MHz and an observed frequency under sustained load of 1,464MHz. It's still a 9 percent increase, and also 19 percent higher than a stock card, but while it's better than we managed with the reference GTX 980 all other versions we've tested have managed up to 50MHz higher on the base, with most comfortably boosting to over 1,500MHz as well. This isn't a huge difference, and PNY has certainly done a lot to maximise your overclocking potential, but it does go to show that it's often just about the luck of the draw. Adding extra voltage to the core wasn't able to help us reach higher frequencies – the maximum allowed in MSI Afterburner was 87mV.

The memory, at least, played very nicely, and up to a massive 8.1GHz the card was happy to go through our benchmarks multiple times without crashing or artifacting. The previous best for a GTX 980 we've seen was 7.9GHz, so this is an excellent result and a 12.5 percent boost. At this speed, the card's total memory bandwidth is 259.2GB/sec.