Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1070 Graphics Card Review

Overclocking and Overclocked Performance

Given the dynamic nature of boost clocks on modern graphics cards, I decided to implement a new process displaying the average clock speeds before and after manually overclocking. This allows the end-user to see the real-world performance as the specification posted on the manufacturer’s website or packaging isn’t reflective of what you’ll experience. Furthermore, any sporadic dips in the boost clock can be investigated because it will make a large impact on the smoothness and overall performance.

After enabling the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1070’s OC profile, the boost clock hit an average figure of 1948MHz while the memory maintained a solid speed of 2003.4MHz. This was achieved with a 65.9C load temperature and 1.0492V.

Overclocking the graphics card was a painless procedure and required realistic expectations about the kind of possible gains from the substantial factory boost. Despite this, I managed to increase the boost clock to 1935MHz by setting an 111% power limit and +9 temperature maximum. Of course, the voltage was enhanced to find the GPU’s potential. Please note, even though the GPU clock says +150, this refers to the standard gaming mode and not the OC profile. Therefore, the actual improvement is slightly lower. The memory also overclocked relatively well and remained stable with a further 664MHz. Initially, I tried to push this beyond 700MHz, but this wasn’t possible and resulted in the Valley benchmark crashing.

Once overclocked, the boost clock average went up to 2063MHz and the memory settled at 2166.8MHz. As shown by the readings below, the voltage increased slightly to 1.0500V as did the TDP percentage. Although, it’s always best to focus on the clock readings to showcase the stability of the overclocked boost.

Here is the screenshot comparing the stock configuration and manual overclock:

Doom

In Doom, the overclock made a huge difference to the average frame-rate and allowed the graphics card to easily pull ahead of the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti. While it might seem puzzling to encounter such a monumental increase, the rapidly change frame-rate throughout Doom can make this a possibility. Nonetheless, it’s still a wonderful result and emphasises the importance of manually overclocking your graphics hardware.

Far Cry Primal

Of course, the frames-per-second change wasn’t as eventful when benchmarking Far Cry Primal. Saying that, it’s another strong showing and enough of a performance boost to reign supreme as the fastest GTX 1070 card thus far.

Hitman

After the overclock was applied, the GPU’s minimum and average figures both increased by a decent amount.