We already heard that the new GM204 Maxwell GPU based Geforce GTX 980 and the Geforce GTX 970 might be good overclockers but judging from what we currently see and hear, including our published reviews of the ASUS Geforce GTX 970 Strix and the excellent Gigabyte Geforce GTX 980 G1 Gaming, these new Nvidia Geforce graphics cards are not only good overclockers but will definitely be the new record breakers.


In our own ASUS Geforce GTX 970 Strix review, we managed to push the GM204 GPU up to stable 1450MHz at 1.25V while memory was more than capable to be overclocked to 2000MHz (8.0GHz effective), which is definitely more than we expected. These clocks are even more impressive when you consider that the reference GPU Boost clock is set at 1178MHz while memory works at 7.0GHz. This allowed us to reach the 5268 score in the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, which quite impressive.




The Gigabyte Geforce GTX 980 G1 Gaming was even more impressive at our review lab, mostly thanks to its custom design and excellent Windforce 3X 600W cooler that allowed us to push the GM204 GPU up to 1563MHz at 1.25V, while memory was overclocked at 2075MHz, or 8.3GHz effective. This was enough to get us 6809 score in the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme benchmark.




We are quite sure that many overclocking records will be broken with the new GM204 GPU and EVGA, K|NGP|N and TiN have already broken quite a few by running the liquid nitrogen cooled EVGA Geforce GTX 980, overclocked to mind boggling 2050MHz, on EVGA X99 FTW motherboard and powered by the EVGA SuperNOVA 1600W PSU. This allowed them to break 19000 and 9000 scores in the 3DMark Fire Strike and the Fire Strike Exreme benchmarks.





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