any of these . Simply because of the thermal solution employed by NVIDIA and the pricing issue which , again we will get to later .
Since , it is fairly safe to assume you ’ re familiar with the two tables mentioned above , it is worth noting that there are some interesting technologies that NVIDIA has brought forth with the Pascal range of GPUs . Many of these are performance orientated , but some are purely game centric . How many of these technologies will be used will depend on the end user , but suffice to say , new features such as ANSEL will only work provided developers are keen to add such functionality via patching to their titles . If not , it may be a yet another novel idea that just didn ’ t gain traction and subsequently went the way of the Dodo ( remember 3D Vision ?).
Either way , what is of most concern to all of us , even now is performance and in that regard NVIDIA has delivered more than I or anyone could have anticipated .
So around such potent GPUs , it is up to the vendors to produce products that stand justify their existence over and above the Founder ’ s Edition models which despite the name change is essentially reference cards .
To that extent , we gathered three
G1 . GAMING cards from GIGABYTE . In many ways they exemplify everything great and not so great perhaps about partner cards . The good thing is that they are cheaper than the NVIDIA Founder ’ s Edition versions , spot better coolers , generally look better ( even though this is subjective ) and by and large have better performance along with a friendlier price . There ’ s not much to dislike here about that , the only issue though is that because of the inherent high clock frequencies of the GPUs , there ’ s literally nowhere for these partner cards to go in terms of overclocking .
With Turbo 3.0 as well , it has essentially complicated what was an already convoluted way of dealing with clock speeds . The new version of the performance boosting or rather more accurately clock boosting technology allows the GPU to maintain higher clock speeds more frequently power and temperature allowing . This dynamic overclocking feature is great for those who never fiddle with GPU clocks or do not care for overclocking . The downside is that , for those who do it complicates matters and with the previously mentioned frequency ceiling . You end up with a situation where despite all the component wizardry of the partner cards . It largely goes to waste ( more so than before ) as there ’ s not 10MHz to be gained against the Founders Edition cards .
Fortunately , that doesn ’ t preclude cards such as the G1 . GAMING and others from extracting even more performance out the box as you will see , all three of these GPUs feature boost clocks in excess of 1900MHz and in fact that figure is as high as 2GHz sometimes . The ability to reach such high clock speeds with no user intervention is nothing to snivel at and on top of it , keeping the GPU cool enough to maintain those clock speeds is much appreciated .
One can speak of these clock speeds for all three GPUs because it seems as if this is the general limit for the current Pascal GPUs . Be it the TITAN X or the GTX 1060 3GB , they all have a 2 to 2.1GHz limit , outside of the more extreme cooling solutions . As such you may have noticed that the overclocked performance , especially in game tests isn ’ t that much better than the default clock profiles that ship with each of the cards . For the first time , at least in recent history , there ’ s little to no point in overclocking the GPU over and above the frequencies at which you buy it . Again , this is great for more people than it is a disappointment for those who enjoy tweaking their PC performance for the sake of tweaking .
16 The OverClocker Issue 39 | 2016