The GTX 780 arrives – 25 Games benchmarked!

Overclocking the GTX 780

Overclocking the GTX 780 is just as easy as overclocking the Geforce Titan, the GTX 680 or the GTX 690. What is surprising is that we over-matched the GTX Titan’s overclock of +130/+550MHz on the core and memory by +20MHz on the core.  The GTX 780 managed a completely stable +150MHz on the core and +550MHz 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 Summer-like conditions.  We saw much less throttling with the GTX 780 than we did with the TITAN.

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, +165MHz  might be the maximum we can run which is about +25Hz more with the unlocked voltage than at stock. We saw 1163MHz as our highest boost at 1.200V, the highest overvoltage Titan would allow. 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) 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%.

Let’s head to the performance charts and graphs to see how the GTX 780 compares with the Titan, the GTX 690 as well as with the last generation dual-GPU flagships – the AMD HD 6990 and the Nvidia GTX 590 – as well as with the top video cards of this generation, the Titan, the HD 7970 and the GTX 680.