NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Video Card Review

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Overclocking

As you saw from the benchmarks on the previous pages, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is no slouch at stock speeds! Those looking for even more performance can use an overclocking utility like EVGA Precision X to get even more performance from the GP104 ‘Pascal’ GPU. This is due to the fact that NVIDIA left plenty of overhead with particular GPU for enthusaists and gamers to tap into if they wanted to push the envelope a little bit. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is power limited in most game titles and it will often hit the stock temperature target of 83C, so it will also benefit from additional power and a higher temperature target.

We installed a latest version of the EVGA PrecisionX 16 overclocking utility to overclock the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 video card! You can use whatever software utility you like for overclocking, but this was the only one available that supports the Pascal GPU architecture at the time of testing.

In case you forgot, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 card is clocked at 1607 MHz base with a boost clock of 1075MHz. The 8GB of GDDR5X memory is clocked at 1251MHz (5004 MHz effective). Let’s see how much higher we can get this partially disabled GP104 Pascal GPU with 2560 CUDA cores!

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is pretty open when it comes to overclocking. You can increase the power target to 120% and if you leave the GPU Temp Target locked it will automatically increase to 92C. We pushed the GPU Clock offset to +215MHz and the Mem Clock Offset to +400MHz on our card and found it was stable in the game titles that we tested. We could run the memory at +600 MHz, but the performance went down.

This overclock meant that we were running at up to 2075.5MHz at times thanks to NVIDIA Boost 3.0 on the core and 1350 MHz (5400 MHz effective) on the 8GB of Micron GDDR5X memory.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Stock:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Overclocked (+215/+400):

By overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Founders Edition graphics card we were able to take the score of 17,114 on 3DMark Fire Strike and raise it up to 17,911. This is a 797 point increase in our overall 3DMark score, which represents a performance gain of 4.6 percent. The overal FPS average in Graphics Test 1 went from 101.70 to 109.25, which is a 7.4% performance gain in the graphics test.

We benchmarked the GeForce GTX 1080 overclocked to +215MHz core and +400MHz in a number of game titles and found that it was rock solid with nice performance gains. For example in BF4 we were able to average over 60 FPS on the GeForce GTX 1080 with this simple overclock.

Let’s wrap this review up!