 This is my Titan test bench and this is the Titan overclocking guide. Overclocking Titan is very different from previous generation GeForce products due to the way that GPU boost 2 is implemented compared to GPU boost 1. So first let's show you the test bench really quickly here. We've got 16 gigs of Mushkin copperhead memory, it's kind of hiding here, don't worry too much about it. A 4.4 GHz 3770K processor under an H100. We've also got a Maximus V formula motherboard from ASUS. GeForce GTX Titan of course, we'll need one of those. And our benchmark of choice, although we're not really using it for benchmarking purposes, is Crysis 2. So we're using this as our stability test and we're using EVGA precision as the overclocking utility. Now GPU boost 2 differs from GPU boost 1 in one primary way. Instead of relying on GPU voltage, GPU clock speed, and the power target for the board itself, GPU boost 2 relies on the clock speed, the voltage, and the temperature of the GPU. Because what kills video cards in the long term, what kills a processor in the long term, is voltage and temperatures over time. So if NVIDIA knows that, oh okay, well that end user is controlling the temperature, they don't have to account for it being sort of a worst case scenario. So what we see here in EVGA precision, if we can actually open it, there we go, is the configuration that I'm using. Now this graphics card right here is supposed to deliver sort of an 867 MHz boost clock. However, without changing anything, because we're in a relatively cool room, this GPU was running at nearly 1 GHz before we even changed the offset. That's because the temperatures were under control. So I'm going to come in here, I'm going to show you how I would overclock a Titan, or any video card using GPU boost 2. Because you can change your fan speed curve, okay, so come in and have a look at what we can do to the fan curve. So I would start with the fan curve, and I'd say okay, I am willing to accept the noise level of a 70% fan as a worst case scenario. So I'd take that 70% and I'd put that up near the temperature target that I'm going to set. The fan speed is very related to the temperature target. So I go okay, yep, the temperature target is going to be 80 degrees, or 85 or 90 degrees, and I'm willing to tolerate this fan speed. Okay, now you know that that's your worst case scenario. That is how your fan is going to ramp up, so that's going to determine your maximum. So then what you do, is you go in and you go okay, well voltage wise, I would just crank it up, because it doesn't really matter, because the GPU will change its voltage as much as it wants to, but it won't go too far, because the temperature is going to hold it back before it's going to apply more voltage to itself. So it'll actually keep voltage under control on its own. So I just kind of crank that up. Then the next step is I would start to play around with the power target. So power target, I'd just turn up to the max, and you can link or unlink the temp target and the power target. Set a temperature target you're comfortable with. This is where some of that customization comes in. So I could set a fan curve that goes okay, I want to keep the fan speed low, and I'm okay with higher temperatures. I understand that that's going to make the GPU clock itself down and lower its voltage sometimes, but that's a compromise that I'm comfortable with. Or you can go okay, temperature target 70 degrees, fan speed, set a very aggressive curve, and that way you can actually keep those temperatures low, and the GPU will fight to stay there, again, by sort of ramping up voltage and ramping up frequency as much as it can, but then backing off if that temperature starts to go up. So playing around with the power target and the temperature target, as well as the fan curves and the voltage, is all somewhat related. Once you've set those up the way that you want them. So in my case, I set a fan curve that had it ramping up to, I have a temperature target of 90 degrees, I'm willing to tolerate that, and I played around with the fan speeds manually, and I said okay, you know what, 65% is about as loud as I can tolerate. So I set that curve and then I made it much more aggressive. So it's a very gradual ramp up until then, and then once we hit that 90 degrees, I'm going to say okay fan, go ahead and go crazy to bring yourself back down here, if that's what it takes. Then what you start to do is play around with the GPU clock offset. Make sure you're monitoring, because you can set a GPU clock offset of 300 megahertz, but at the end of the day, if the temperature is being exceeded or it needs too much voltage to get there, it exceeds the power targets or whatever other limiting factors come into play, your GPU might not actually be clocking itself up that high. So you need to make sure that you're popping out of your application that you're using to test your overclock and making sure that it's actually even running at a higher frequency. So you turn those up until you either run into stability issues or you notice that the GPU is not clocking any higher, then you have some options. You can turn up your fan curve so you can have it be more aggressive, and that might allow you to attain that higher frequency, or you can turn up your voltage. If the temperatures were already under control, you can go, okay, let the GPU have more voltage, or you can go, okay, I guess that's enough for me. This is the compromise that I'm willing to accept. Once you're done with your GPU clock offset and you say, okay, this is where I've settled in, it's either got to back it off for stability or those other factors, then you start with your memory clock offset. So the consistent performance that we were able to get out of our Titan on an air-cooled test bench, and this is all great news for overclockers because they can just throw a water block on it, set the voltage to max, set the frequency to max, and let the card basically overclock itself. Anyway, what we were able to do on an air-cooled test bench was a consistent clock speed on the GPU of about 1.16 GHz in a 3D application, which is running right now. It's running at around 95 to 100% board power when the game's actually running, when we've been in it for a while, and a memory clock of 3.348 GHz. So that is, at double data rate, almost 6.7 GHz on the memory and then 1.16 GHz on the GPU. So the performance of this is absolutely outstanding. And even in a game like Crysis 3, which we're running at extremely high settings, so you can see right here using EVGA precision monitoring, I can see what everything's running at, what my memory usage is. We're running at around 140 FPS in Crysis 2, which is just outstanding. So I hope this has been helpful for you guys, and good luck with your overclocking endeavors, whether it's on a Titan or some other video card that supports GPU boost, too. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.