Overclocking Under Air Cooling
Before starting our tests with water cooling, we took several measurements using MSI's stock air cooler. These serve as our baseline. The factory voltages we used were 1.06V for Nvidia's GP102 processor and 1.38V for the VRAM.
At an ambient temperature around 25°C, we forced the cooling fans to operate at a 70% duty cycle and pushed the Power Limit to its 115% maximum, hopefully reducing the frequency pull-back under load. With those settings, our GPU crested 50°C, but never went beyond the 60s.
The table below includes peak clock rates in Futuremark's 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. First, we tried maximizing the GPU frequency. Then we overclocked the memory. After several random crashes, we figured out that the GPU was less stable after the memory was overclocked as well. This forced us back to the drawing board in search of a better balance between both overclocks.
Only the third and fourth cards were tested in this section, since our first and second boards were delivered without a heat sink.
Frequencies for 3DMark Time Spy | GPU | RAM |
---|---|---|
Card #3 | 2040 MHz | 1540 MHz (12,320 MT/s) |
Card #4 | 2050 MHz | 1540 MHz (12,320 MT/s) |
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