On The Bench: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock

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Gigabyte recently sent us an altered GeForce GTX 470 with the highest factory overclock that we’ve seen. Is the custom-cooled card worth an extra $70 bucks? We test the GV-N470SO-13I, comparing it to Nvidia’s reference GTX 470, in order to find out.

Benchmark Results: Overclocked Performance

With the GPU voltage increased from 0.996 V to 1.167 V, we raise the Gigabyte GV-N470SO-13I’s core clock to 800 MHz and the shader clock to 1600 MHz. The result is a stable overclock. And, from what we’ve seen in the past, this is more than you can usually expect out of a reference GeForce GTX 470.

3DMark Vantage shows how overclocking boosts performance over the reference card by 19%.

In Crysis, the overclock really separates the Gigabyte GV-N470SO-13I from the reference GeForce GTX 470’s performance, leapfrogging into GeForce GTX 480 territory, as demonstrated in our Factory Overclocked High-End Graphics Cards review.

Don Woligroski
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.