NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB Video Card Review

Overclocking The GeForce GTX 690

We installed the EVGA Precision X 3.0.2 software utility to overclock the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 video card to see just how far we could push this card. With the new Kepler core architecture design used on the GeForce 600 series, you can now adjust the power target of the video card along with GPU and Memory clock offsets within a certain range.

EVGA Precision X v3.0.2 lets you increase the power target to 135%, the GPU clock offset to 549MHz and the Memory clock offset to 1000MHz.

After spending an afternoon with our GeForce GTX 690 we found that we were able to reach +160MHz on the core without any voltage increases. This is a great overclock on this dual-GPU card and saw the card hitting over 1230MHz when it was running boost in 3DMark 11 and game titles. We didn’t mess with overclocking the memory much as most of the gains on Kepler are with the GPU clock speeds.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 at Stock Settings:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 w/ 135% Power Target & +160MHz GPU Clock Offset:

With this overclock we were able to hit P17419 on 3DMark 11 with the performance preset. This is a over a 2000 point increase in our score, which is a very nice 13% improvement in performance. The stock score was P15411!

We literally got this card less than 72 hours before this article was published and didn’t have much time to overclock it. We are sure this card has more left in it! We have been told that setting the voltage doesn’t matter much these days as the max voltage setting in EVGA Precision X utility is 1175mV and the card automatically defaults to that under load.

Seeing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 hitting over 1200MHz this easily is impressive considering this is a dual-GPU card!