The GTX 780 Ti is unleashed on PowerColor’s 290X OC

Overclocking the GTX 780

Overclocking the GTX 780 Ti is just as easy as overclocking the Geforce Titan, the GTX 680/770 or the GTX 690. The GTX 780 Ti managed a completely stable +175MHz on the core and +400MHz on the memory. We did not adjust the GTX 780’s fan profile, nor voltage for our benchmark runs. We did however, push up the temperature controls to maximum since we tested in Fall-like (cool – 72-75F) conditions. We saw much less throttling with the GTX 780 Ti than we did with the Titan.  We also made very sure to warm up all of our cards before benching.

Moving up the power slider to 106% and the temperature up to the maximum 94C using EVGA’s Precision showed very little performance gain over simply setting the temperature limiter to 85C.

We would suggest that for absolute stability, +200MHz might be the maximum we can run which is about +25Hz more with the unlocked voltage than at stock. We saw 1176MHz as our highest boost at stock voltage although it blipped 1194MHz. It’s probably not what extreme overclockers are looking for since Nvidia has still locked down the voltage and the TDP somewhat.

Temperatures running at stock settings were an issue for Boost as the fan profile remained extraordinarily quiet at maximum load, but they allowed the temperature to reach 79C which throttled back Boost and made some of our results variable.

We found that setting the upper limit to 85C (as with Titan/GTX 780) no longer limited Boost; our other choice was to set the fan profile higher so that it would reach 60%. For us, the VGA fan became noticeable over 60% and much more so at 75%.  Our GTX 780 Ti appears to let the fan spin up a bit higher than the GTX 780 or the Titan with a little more noise under full load.  When we overclocked +175MHz on the core, the temperatures rose by 2C to 87C.

Let’s head to the performance charts and graphs to see how the GTX 780 Ti compares with the top cards of 2013.