Nvidia’s GTX 760 arrives to take direct aim at the HD 7950

Overclocking, Power Draw & Temperatures

Overclocking

Overclocking the GTX 760 beyond the stock clocks are easy. No one should let the boost clocks intimidate them. Using EVGA Precision tool, simply push the sliders to the right as far as you dare and set the clocks and apply. No more shader clocks to adjust as the vRAM and the core clocks are easy to set.

The only differences with Boost 2 from the 600 series are in setting a temperature target. We found in practice that Nvidia’s default choice of 80C is too low for Summer gaming and we experienced variability with our initial runs performing higher than later runs when the performance is throttled when Boost 2 lowers the clockspeeds in response to hitting the thermal limit.

We solved these issues by setting the power draw and temperature sliders to maximum – +106% power target and 94C for the temperature target – much as we do for AMD cards with PowerTune. In this way, we find uniformity in our benchmark runs and less of a chance for Boost to throttle down clocks in response to a low thermal limit. The maximum overvoltage which is allowed is +.12mV which we did not use at all in our benching.

As usual, we are not looking for the ultimate overvolted overclock with our VGA fan screaming along at 100%. We always test with our cards at stock voltage and with the stock fan profile so that our reader may have a good idea of midrange overclocking.

We finally settled on increasing the base clock by +110MHz over the base clock of 980MHz and we witnessed 1110MHz as the regular maximum boost but 1215MHz as the boost when overclocked.  We were able to get +400MHz on the memory clocks.

Temperature

The GTX 760 fan speeds stayed moderate up to 60% with temperatures right up to 82C under load at stock which is unusual as it should throttle at 80C.   It definitely gets toasty with the Power and Temperature sliders set to maximum as we saw 88C under load when overclocked and the fan ran up to 80% automatically which is definitely more noticeable than our GTX 780, GTX 770 and even the GTX 680; it is similar to our GTX 670 reference design.  Our sample of the GTX 760 was quite loud when we first got it and it “settled in” after use which leads us to think that ours is a little louder than average.  We hope to get a second GTX 760 to test later on this week and we shall also give SLI results.

We always use EVGA’s Precision overclocking tool which recently added further over-volting for Titan and 700 series. Moving up the power slider to 106% and the temperature up to the maximum 94C using EVGA’s Precision showed some performance gain over simply setting the temperature limit to 85C as we regularly saw 86-88C.

Our ambient (room temperatures) were fairly moderate from 72-76F so as to approximate a cool late Spring day. Be aware that we used our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I case which has excellent airflow for even a full tower. The GTX 760 runs moderately warm at our overclock, in the high-80s C under load. If we did not increase our temperature target to at least 88C, we found that we often saw Boost throttle the clockspeeds to lower the temperatures.

We eventually settled on +110MHz core/+400MHz memory as absolutely stable across all benchmarks in all situations.

Noise

All the modern Nvidia cards are generally quiet for high-end flagship cards. The Fermi GTX 580 was already reasonably quiet for a powerful card, but the GTX 680 is noticeably quieter and the GTX 770 is quieter still. Unfortunately, the GTX 760 does not share the same coolers as these cards, but is much closer to the reference GTX 670’s fan noise.

Let’s head to the performance charts and graphs to see how the GTX 760 compares to the HD 7970 as well as to the GTX 660 Ti and the GTX 670. We also added the GTX 560 Ti to our testing bench for this evaluation.