EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW Video Card Review

Overclocking the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 HYDRO FTW

The EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper can easily be overclocked via any number of applications out there.

Starting out with our already overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW we already have a decent boost over reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470’s. However, decent is never enough!

Running Furmark 1.8.2 in the background has always been a good indicator of stability while I work on a graphics card overclock. I was able to achieve stability in Furmark 1.8.2 at an impressive 805MHz on the Fermi GF100 core and 895MHz on the memory. That is an additional 25.5% on the core (over reference) and an additional 5.5% on the memory! Unfortunately, Furmark seems to have lied to me.

Every time I tried to run 3DMark Vantage the system would crash. Ultimately I had to back down the memory and core clocks to 786MHz on the core and 874 on the memory. The core was still and additional 136MHz or 22.4%. This gives us a total overclock of 179MHz or 29.4% over a vanilla NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470!

Once we had a rock solid overclock I ran through 3DMark Vantage several times. The GPU Score in 3DMark Vantage improved by ~2500 points with a just a little work and a lot of fun. Overall scores improved by varying amounts. If we left the PhysX configuration on auto select we saw an overall improvement of 2861 points or 14.9%. Setting the PhysX to run on the CPU, our overall score improved by 1942 points or 11.9%. It is also well worth noting that the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper was able to out perform the HIS Radeon HD 5870 even though PhysX was limited to the CPU!