cerebus
Honorary Master
The GTX 980M is extremely high performing out of the box already, but there is always more to gain if you’re brave enough. That’s right, today we will be overclocking a little bit.
Before doing this yourself, you should know that the drivers limit how high you can actually set your GPU frequency. Being a mobile GPU, you won’t have to worry about fan profiles or voltages though, as these are simply not adjustable – all you need to worry about is clock frequencies. No power limits, no fan profiles.
Test system:
The 980M-equipped GT72 scores a cool 8207p in Fire Strike and over 11000 in 3DMark 11 on the performance preset – figures that even the high-end offerings on the desktop side just recently can’t match. For example, the same system with a GTX 580 wouldn’t reach these scores.
Never mind though – we were supposed to try out overclocking, so with Afterburner 4.0, we set core frequency as high as it would go (+135MHz or 1173MHz/1262MHz Boost on GPU and 6212MHz on the memory). The GPU had no problem with this frequency, while higher memory frequencies would crash. The results are even further improved performance, with little increase in graphics card temperature – the Fire Strike score increases from 8207 to 9107 points, a 10.97% increase in performance with no effort to speak of.
The 3DMark 11 scores also yield a nice boost of a bit over 600 points, or 5.55% at the same frequencies.
There is almost always free performance to gain from overclocking – just make sure your cooling is up for the job. In the GT72, these bumps in frequency don't load the cooling too much, so they work for pretty much everyday use.
Before doing this yourself, you should know that the drivers limit how high you can actually set your GPU frequency. Being a mobile GPU, you won’t have to worry about fan profiles or voltages though, as these are simply not adjustable – all you need to worry about is clock frequencies. No power limits, no fan profiles.
Test system:
- MSI GT72
- Intel Core i7-4700HQ
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 8GB
- 16GB DDR3-1600
The 980M-equipped GT72 scores a cool 8207p in Fire Strike and over 11000 in 3DMark 11 on the performance preset – figures that even the high-end offerings on the desktop side just recently can’t match. For example, the same system with a GTX 580 wouldn’t reach these scores.
Never mind though – we were supposed to try out overclocking, so with Afterburner 4.0, we set core frequency as high as it would go (+135MHz or 1173MHz/1262MHz Boost on GPU and 6212MHz on the memory). The GPU had no problem with this frequency, while higher memory frequencies would crash. The results are even further improved performance, with little increase in graphics card temperature – the Fire Strike score increases from 8207 to 9107 points, a 10.97% increase in performance with no effort to speak of.
The 3DMark 11 scores also yield a nice boost of a bit over 600 points, or 5.55% at the same frequencies.
There is almost always free performance to gain from overclocking – just make sure your cooling is up for the job. In the GT72, these bumps in frequency don't load the cooling too much, so they work for pretty much everyday use.
