Overclocking

The latest version (at the time of testing) of the Firestorm overclocking utility that Zotac supports its cards with needs considerable work and is clearly an early build. For example, keying in a GPU offset value applies double that amount to the clock speed for some reason, and sometimes attempting to apply an overclock resulted in a crash. The built-in Scanner for automatic overclocking also didn’t function properly, so we stuck to manual overclocking.

The power limit and temperature limit were maximised (115 percent and 88°C respectively), and we added 100mV to the GPU voltage offset too.

Following this, we were able to increase the clock speeds by 120MHz, giving us base and boost speeds of 1,470MHz and 1,785MHz respectively. It’s the in-game boosting which matters, though, and that was typically hovering at a little under 2GHz, which is an improvement on the FE card that was more in the region of 1,900MHz once overclocked.

We managed to attain stability with the memory clocked at 15Gbps (seven percent boost), but in the interest of time we didn’t attempt to go any higher, as battling the Firestorm software was becoming irksome, and we had an appointment with some wet paint to watch it dry.