EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Classified Video Card Review
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Overclocking the EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Classified
All of the information up to this point has been the normal testing type data you would expect but this section must be the part EVGA wanted to keep classified. We played around with this graphics card for a bit to figure out its personality on the test bench. But once we cracked the code… CLASSIFIED!
When we first started pushing on the clocks we utilized the included EVGA precision tool and were pretty happy with moving the core clock from the factory overclock at 823 MHz up an additional 100 MHz to 923 MHz or an additional 12% bump in performance above what EVGA had done in the factory.
While this is impressive gain for an already overclocked card we kept pushing to see if we could get more but to no avail. Then it occurred to us how much of a temperature difference maxing out the fan at 100% had on this card in our a bit too warm test room.
Stock cooler with ambient at 26.5C we were able to push the EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Classified to:
This is an additional 16% above what EVGA had the core and shaders set to when it left their factory and a 9% bump in the memory clocks. This also is a whopping 31% above the NVIDIA reference specifications for a GeForce GTX 570 card!
To see how well we did we started reading several of the enthusiast forums to find this performance is as good as, and in many cases beats, what some of the guys on water cooling are able to hit. However we did come across a forum post where they had the card in a room with an ambient of 2C in conjunction with mods that allowed high vCore than you can get with Precisions, GPU Tweak, or MSI Afterburner and were hitting over 1025 MHz core but I would rather not be gaming in a 2C room. That said I am sure we could have squeezed out another 10 – 20 MHz if we could have lowered our ambient temperature.
Overclock Performance:
We took the one benchmark that the HD 6970 beat the EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Classified and tested again with the overclock only to see the tables quickly turned.
That extra boost in core and memory added 4.7 FPS at 2560 x 1600 and 7.7 FPS at 1920 x 1200 resolution.
Running the card through all three presets in 3D Mark 11 showed another nice jump in performance with this level of overclock.
The down side:
We would not push this card this far with the stock cooler unless you really like noise. While that setup worked great to attain a fairly high overclock without doing anything exotic that stock fan at 100% is extremely loud. Aftermarket fans or water cooling would resolve this and possibly allow you to go even higher.
And of course there is the price you pay in the extra power draw. Using the extreme test of Furmark 1.9.1 again you can see our additional 16% overclock also gave us a overall system power consumption hit of an additional 14 watts.
For our Aliens vs. Predator loop the overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Classified did keep it close at 301 watts in a more typical usage scenario.
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