MSI N560GTX Ti Hawk Overclocking

Before I start overclocking I like to get a little bit of information, firstly I like to establish operating temperatures and since we know these are well within specifications we can quickly move on. Next I like to know what the voltage and clock limits are, so I fired up the bundled MSI Afterburner utility. I established that vCore was adjustable between 825mV and 1150mV and clock speeds were limited to 1350MHz max on the GPU (linked Shaders 2700MHz) and 3500MHz DDR (7GHz effective!!!) maximum frequency for the memory. This is more than enough range to move forward with, armed with this info I know I can squeeze every last drop of performance out of the MSI GTX 560Ti Hawk. My preferred weapons are MSI Afterburner (v2.2.0 Beta 3) for fine tuning while using FurMark (v1.9.0) to load the GPU.

Above is a reminder of the temperature and clock speeds of the MSI GTX 560Ti Hawk, everything looked as if the Hawk was going to break some serious barriers but sadly it wasn't to be. During my overclocking session with FurMark the MSI GTX 560Ti Hawk had passed the 1GHz GPU barrier (1067MHz) but it proved to be unstable during benchmark testing. It wasn't until I reduced the GPU clock speed to 990MHz (+81mV GPU voltage) that stability was again established. Memory overclocks became unstable above 2230MHz DDR (4.4GHz effective) despite an 80mV voltage increase on the memory voltage.

Due to time constraints I wasn't able to experiment further with clock speeds and the potential stability enhancements from enabling OCP via the switch on the rear side of the PCB. I fully intend to experiment further with overclocking the MSI GTX 560Ti Hawk as I believe this card has more potential, until then though the increases in performance from this round of overclocking are displayed below.

With a 40MHz GPU overclock (168MHz over reference design) and a 65MHz memory overclock (113MHz over reference design) we went back to the bench and ran through the entire test suite. Overall there is an average 3.88% increase in scores (at 1920x1080 resolution). We also re ran temperature tests at the overclocked speeds with a slightly lower ambient temperature of 26°C. The Twin Frozr III cooler on the MSI N560GTX-Ti Hawk once again did not fail to please, at idle the GPU sat at 36°C (40% fan speed). Pushing the temperature up with FurMark saw the GPU load temperature rise to 75°C (71% fan speed) and cranking the fan on manual to 100% saw the temperature drop to 71°C.

That's all of the testing over for now, in the next section I will deliver my final thoughts and conclusion.

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