Taking It To The Limit: Overclocking NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970 & 980

We’ve established that NVIDIA’s Maxwell-based graphics cards are impressive, but can they continue to impress when it comes to overclocking? As it turns out, yes – yes they can. Given their ability to push clocks far beyond stock, we’ve even decided to take up a challenge: Can an overclocked GTX 970 match a stock GTX 980?

With our look at NVIDIA’s Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 980 and 970 out-of-the-way, I thought I’d spend some time taking a look at them again, but this time from an overclocking perspective. When we were briefed by the company a couple of weeks ago, it made a point to say that Maxwell was a very overclockable architecture, and as the results here will prove, it wasn’t joking.

For GTX 980 overclocking, I’ll be making use of NVIDIA’s reference card, whereas for the GTX 970, ASUS’ Strix will fill the role. Both cards will be interesting to look at from the overclocking perspective, but as the GTX 970 comes equipped with an impressive overclock already, it might prove to be the more interesting of the two.

Before we take a look at the results, I want to explain what I consider to be a good overclock. First and foremost, it has to be stable. If I can’t hammer the card with benchmark after benchmark and see it pass a two-hour stress test, I don’t consider it stable. I think overclocks should be realistic, and not push the boundary so far that a user risks their PC crashing while in the middle of a game. Secondly, I take care to not go overboard – I boost the power target by 10%, and the peak temperature by 5°C (which, as it happens, isn’t needed).

Let’s get right to it.

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