EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked ACX Cooling Video Card Review

EVGA GTX 780 SC w/ AXC Cooling Overclocking

We installed the EVGA Precision X 4.2.0 software utility to see how the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked w/ ACX Cooling 3GB video card could be overclocked!

EVGA Precision X v4.2.0 includes a few new features that are new to some of the high-end NVIDIA graphics cards. Not only can you adjust the power target, GPU and Memory clock offsets within a certain range, but you can now also adjust the temperature and power targets. By default the power and temp targets are linked together, but you can unlink them and adjust them independently.

In case you forgot, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 reference card has a base clock of 863MHz, a boost clock of 902MHz and the memory runs at 6008MHz. The EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked w/ ACX Cooling card comes already overclocked to 967MHz core and 1020MHz boost, but the memory is left at 6008MHz. This card should have some room left to overclock as EVGA also offers a FTW and Classified versions of this card with even higher clock speeds than this. Let’s take a look and see if we can tap into that extra overclocking headroom to get a free performance gain.

To see how much higher we could get we increased the power target to 106% and the temperature target to 94C. This is the highest possible setting for each. We then slowly increased the GPU clock offset and memory clock offset to see how far we could go before the card would become unstable. We ended up with a GPU clock offset to +100MHz and the mem clock offset to +400MHz before we started to get encounter some issues.

We found this overclock to be rock solid and we saw the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC was hitting 1215MHz thanks to boost on the core and 1709MHz memory (6808MHz effective). This is not a bad overclock and we were very happy with the performance gains it gave us.

For example in 3DMark Fire Strike we saw performance go from 9304 to 10080 by overclocking the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked w/ ACX Cooling video card. This is a performance gain of 8.3% and enough extra power to outperform a stock GeForce GTX Titan! The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 reference card scores 8700 points in Fire Strike, so this is nearly a 16% performance improvement over a default reference card! That is very impressive and enough to surpass the GeForce GTX Titan 6GB video card that costs $999!

When it comes to power use we took a look at the peak power in 3DMark Fire Strike Game Test 1 (GT1) and found that it jumped up 18 Watts on average when we looked at three runs on each setting. This is a 4.5% jump in power consumption, which isn’t bad considering that we are getting a 16% performance increase in this application.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked w/ ACX Cooling is an impressive card with the factory overclocked settings, but it can easily be overclocked beyond that and become one helluva graphics card!