GeForce GTX 480 - Overclocking
On to the overclocking. It’s always interesting to see what you can get from a new architecture, but we have to add that we don’t expect to hit any sky-high frequencies, since the stock frequencies are 700MHz on the core, 1401MHz on shaders and 924MHz on the GDDR5 memory. Our first intention was to push on quite a bit, but either NVIDIA has failed to construct a proper memory controller, or all the good GDDR5 memory chips still go to AMD. We could only do 1000MHz (4000MHz QDR) with our test card.
The purpose of the overclock was to see the potential limits of the GTX 480 core, but also see what the everyday user can get from the card with ordinary air cooling. We will therefore include the below overclocking in our regular benchmarks. The only requirement was that the card could run stable through our tests without downclocking, which worked just fine without saying too much.
 810/1620/1000MHz – with stock voltages |
That the GF100 core runs hot may not come as a surprise with 250W TDP , overclocking makes it even hotter. We did manage to get it stable at 810MHz with the stock voltage, using EVGA Precision, one of the application that supports the GTX 400 series before launch.
 CHiL Semiconductor CHL8266 – GTX 480 voltage controller |
The card uses CHiL Semiconductors’ CHL8266 voltage controller, which we can’t find any real data on, making any voltmods that much harder to perform. The controller has an IC bus for changing voltages through software and we have heard that ASUS will release an updated version of SmartDoctor with support for GeForce GTX480. We will have to get back to this in a later article where we try to tame GTX 480 using liquid nitrogen.
