 The dark art of overclocking. So the GTX 680 is to my understanding fairly over over the overclockable but I haven't seen any numbers yet so I'm going to be using a retail sample so this is probably going to be the only review that's up on launch day of the GTX 680 using a retail non hand-picked board and we're going to see how far it goes and how well it can compare in terms of performance to the highly overclockable HD 7970 from AMD. So I've already got a lot of my numbers prepared here. I have my stock speed 680 results, I have my stock speed 7970 results, then I have my 680 OC results still to fill in because I have not yet begun overclocking and then I've got my 7970 OC results which are based on basically maxing out the overclocking within the catalyst control center so we were running at 1.125 GHz on the processor and then 6.3 GHz on the memory so this is one freaking fast card and I am very very excited to see what we can get out of its main competitor the GTX 680. Here you go yeah I'll be having a look right so guys I'll be having a look at not only the performance but also the difference in power consumption from overclocking these cards so you can see there was definitely an increase and increase increase from the stock power consumption to the overclock power consumption I'll also be looking at how temperatures are affected because I've got all of my baseline readings done so stay tuned guys we are going to be using EVGA precision which at launch is the only overclocking application to support the 680 I'm more of an MSI afterburner guy myself I love their oh yeah see it's not gonna work I love their simple interface and I'm just very used to it I like the way they do their graphs but since precision is what we're using precision is what I will have to figure out how to how to work so stay tuned guys let's see how this goes well I guess we better do a basic rundown of precision X first so number one is that it has integrated voltage adjustments for the GPU so you can actually slide these to where you want them to go do to do you can press set I'm not going to be changing any voltages I did not change voltages on the 7970 so I will not be adjusting voltages on the GTX 680 for the sake of this basic overclocking guide you guys want to turn up voltages on your CPUs be careful in terms of your cooling be careful not to fry your GPU because it is a very expensive mistake to make and while yes turning up voltages may not affect it in any way this is a new graphics card on a new manufacturing process there are no guarantees that it won't break your card whether it's today or tomorrow or two months or no so maybe let someone else be the guinea pig okay so we've got a performance log frame rate target which is this kind of neat thing right here we can enable this to set a target FPS which is interesting because it seems to be related to the fact that the GTX 680 dynamically scales its power consumption which is I don't know probably here somewhere okay don't see it but it scales its power consumption with its GPU clocks in order to achieve the optimal heat output to swell to stay within the the power target and heat target that it was designed for so in order to get any serious overclocking done you're probably going to want to adjust your power target so I'm gonna go ahead and tell it pretty much I don't care what kind of power target you reach as long as we're not turning up any voltage okay so that's one thing we've also got monitoring of temperature monitoring of fan speed this is cool you can use this software to set up a fan curve I love fan curves I think they're amazing I think giving users the control to say okay yeah I'm comfortable you know with really low fan speeds up to 70 degrees 70 degrees and then I want it to ramp right up to 100% get it cooled back down if you want it to work that way you can totally make it work that way so I'm gonna turn that off adjusting voltages aha GPU clock offset so let's talk about GPU boost so the basic clock here so that's at about 1 gigahertz 1006 megahertz or something like that and then the boost clock at 1056 or something along those lines those are both clock speeds of your GPU so you can you can set an offset so what that means is the offset until it detects that it has extra TDP room extra power room in order to boost itself up from the offset that you've set so for example if I set the offset at 100 megahertz and I know this GPU is probably going to be good for 100 megahertz otherwise I wouldn't set that you should probably only go up in increments of like you know 15 to 25 go ahead and apply that you can see those dials are hopefully going to move in some way unless that's just showing the the base default one okay cool interesting maybe we'll just get started and see how this goes okay but either way that's how offsets are supposed to work so as it needs more power it can boost itself up and you're just setting up what the base GPU clock will be and it'll boost from there that's sort of the point okay guys so I see how this works now while I don't recommend using firm arc for any kind of extended period of time it's been handy for me for this because it's allowed me to examine how the here with the performance log I can see the percentage of power that the board is using please focus there we go compared to see we've hit 132 which is the maximum I was able to set for the power target compared to what the GPU clock is actually running at so 1145 is what we seem to be peaking at which is actually 1172 is our 100% peak so that's we should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 106 plus 153 so what is that alright 1006 plus 153 so 1161 something like that so yeah you can see we're we're popping up there once in a while but not staying there consistently so I'll have to look at how performance is actually affected but it looks like the way the overclocking works at least with precision is that we are pretty much just overclocking the boost clock and I don't see a way to adjust the base clock although because yeah obviously I can't find any manual or instructions for this right now but if it turns out that I'm wrong then I apologize and guys please leave a comment and let me know but there we have it so let's see what kind of a performance improvement we get by increasing the turbo GPU boost clock offset on the GTX 680 well I can see this causing some confusion so due to the way GPU boosts works where it turns up the GPU clock if it has the available power headroom if you turn the overclocking the offset up past where it's capable of throttling to it looks like performance does not continue to scale so you can see we have a score of 3167 so I'm gonna go back to my spreadsheet now when I was at 153 offset we were able to score 3488 on the extreme preset in 3dmark 11 however what you guys will see is 3172 so this is almost exactly the same as what I got with my stock configuration on the GTX 680 so it looks like once we turn it up past the threshold it doesn't necessarily scale 100% correctly now this is an early beta version of precision X and like I said I have no instructions so I'm not even 100% sure if I'm doing it right but I'm gonna put it back at the setting I had before and run it one more time to see if I can get my overclocked setting dialed in here so now we see an even higher score so this is at plus 153 so you can see we're getting about 1250 megahertz when the benchmarks are actually running and we're seeing about a 100 ish 102 119 now 126 so we're seeing pretty close to the power threshold that that we've set over here in some strenuous situation so let's do some real-world benchmarking and find out how this GPU boost overclocking actually works now I would really prefer if they made some tweaks to the to the interface here allowing you to boost up this base clock rather than only the boost clock so that you have at least some idea of a baseline that you're running at without it doing any like funky scaling back and forth but maybe that's something we'll see in a future revision hard to say let's check out the real-world performance so this is weird check this out guys so with the overclocked settings running on the GTX 680 I'm not getting that weird flickering that I was getting in Skyrim with it at stock speed so yeah I don't know what to say it seems to have kind of healed itself anyway I'm just finishing up my overclocked settings benchmarking and I'll be done shortly so in conclusion even after overclocking both of the cards the GTX 680 is still the winner and once I get the hang of overclocking it it might actually be a winner by a more substantial margin so I have a game running in the background so this shows what my final overclock ended up being 145 this was stable in all of my games you can see the fluctuations in the clock speed as well as the fluctuations in the peak power consumption according to the power target up here so I mean yeah I think there's probably still some refinement to be done to the precision X tool or whatever other tools end up becoming popular with these cards but let's talk results for a little bit here so idle power is up about 10 watts versus the stock clocked card and then idle temps are around the same 3d mark 11 we saw up to 3572 3d marks although at the same clock speeds we saw scores about as about a hundred marks lower even so there seems to be some inconsistency in the scores although we saw fairly consistent improvements across the board actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide all this other stuff so we saw fairly consistent improvements across the board so here is the so we saw about a 7 8 percent improvement in battlefield 3 then in crisis 2 we saw yeah very little there so about a 4 percent improvement three and a half percent improvement something along those lines which are two we see about a you know 8 percent improvement something along those lines or like 6 or whatever that works out to power consumption is a little bit higher across the board using the same methodology I was using in my original performance review to measure that see this is weird dirt 3 actually went down a little bit in terms of average frame rate although power consumption went up substantially that man Arkham City is up significantly I'm probably gonna have to rerun these numbers and I'll do an annotation on my original review video if there's anything foul about them because you can see that power consumption number is low that could also have to do with GPU boost scaling back the power and scaling back the performance Skyrim we see Nvidia is definitely the king here and we see a very moderate performance improvement in Skyrim that is what I would consider to be within the margin of error for this test so we didn't see much of a performance boost there however it is still good enough to beat the Radeon 79 70 overclocked so there you have it guys my GTX 680 let's call this preliminary overclocking video because I don't think we can call these results final but this is what I've got ready for launch and hopefully I'll be able to do a follow-up at some point let you guys know if there are any changes to my overclocking methodology with this card don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and don't forget how dedicated I am to you guys here here I am finishing up my benchmarks and I'm probably not done for the night yet so enjoy subscribe for more sleep-deprived nights with me