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Overclocking Performance
When it comes to overclocking, your never know what you’re going to get. With that said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least try, especially given the GTX 960 Strix OC's cooling hardware.
GPU Tweak is Asus’ own overclocking utility. It allows for direct control of several parameters: GPU Boost Clock, Memory Clock and Fan Speed are available by default.
Enabling advanced mode grants access to GPU Voltage, Power and Temperature Targets, as well as FPS target and refresh rate. The software is fairly straightforward to use. You can adjust the slider bars, or you can click on the numbers and type in values.
Saving a profile is also quite easy. Simply set the parameters you want, click on the save button and a set of numbers appears below. Click on the profile number you want to save to, and that’s it. The next time you click on that profile number at the bottom of the screen, those settings are applied.
The first thing that should be done when overclocking an Nvidia-based GPU is to max the power target. This adjustment allows for the GPU to draw more power than stock. Manufacturers have control of how much power their cards can draw. In this case, Asus sets that to 115%.
Overclocking is a delicate process, so smaller adjustments are best. For this card we started with 20MHz increments. Using this method, the highest stable offset ended up being +120. Even at 125MHz, the GPU was unstable. This gave us a GPU Boost clock rate of 1437MHz, which in-game registers as 1461MHz
After finding the maximum GPU overclock, the memory was adjusted. Using the same method as the GPU, only with 50MHz adjustments, the maximum offset was reached at 250MHz. No amount of voltage would allow for even 5MHz more. After adjustments, the memory was running at 1863MHz.
Remarkably, even with the overclock the temperature of the GPU never exceeded 62 degrees Celsius.