Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition Video Card Review

Overclocking the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470

The GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition is already starting 93MHz higher on the core than your traditional vanilla NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470. Is that going to stop us from pushing the envelope just a bit further? In short, No!

GIGABYTE offers their own overclocking software that you can use to increase the speed of the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition. It has been dubbed OC Guru and can be downloaded here.

Without adjusting any of the Voltages we were able to increase the core clock to an impressive 786MHz. That gives us a total overclock of 29.5% over the reference 607MHz, and an additional 12.3% over the 700MHz that we started with!

As impressive as that is, we didn’t want to leave it at that. Using the overclocking software we increased the voltage to 1.012 Volts from the default of .937 Volts and continued to crank up the speeds. Ultimately we were able to increase the core to 838MHz which is an additional 52MHz or 8.6% for a total overclock of 38% over reference cards and 19.7% over the starting point of the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition!

After increasing the NVIDIA GF100 core to the maximum stable overclock before voltage adjustments we saw a 1347 point boost in the overall score. That is an improvement of 6.7%. Once we started to increase the voltage we saw an additional 1506 point boost. That is an overall improvement of 14.1%. Taking a look at the GPU score increases we saw a boost of 1238 3DMarks or 7.4% pre-voltage increase and an improvement of 2556 3DMarks or 15.2% after we started increasing the voltage of the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition graphics card.