NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Review

Overclocking Results

In order to overclock our GTX 480, we used EVGA’s new GTX 400-series Precision tool while stress testing was done using the upcoming EVGA OC Scanner that provides an artifact scanner. If an overclock passed 30 minutes of artifact scanning, it was considered stable. Fan speed was set to 70% for the duration of these tests.

Also note that the fixed function stage clock (core clock) is directly linked to the speed of the processor clock (CUDA cores / shaders) and as such, you cannot overclock each one individually as you could do on the GT200 series. Basically, the fixed function clock is ½ that of the processor clock.

Final Overclocks:

Core: 775Mhz
Processors: 1550Mhz
Memory: 4010Mhz (QDR)

While the memory overclocked extremely well on this card, our sample really didn’t achieve a significant increase in shader and core clocks. Nonetheless, we got about 70Mhz out of the core clock which is decent to say the least. This may not be indicative of other samples but we are guessing this will be close to the maximum allowable overclock due to both voltage and heat restrictions. Nonetheless, as you will see below, the substantial memory overclocks do have an impact on overall performance.

Here is how the increased clock speeds impact upon the GTX 480’s performance in the Unigine: Heaven benchmark.