Overclocking
We're a little surprised that Gigabyte opted not to pre-overclock the card's 1GB frame buffer.
But that's what the enthusiast community will be doing, and we've had a little tinker ourselves. Applying a minor bump in voltage - up from 0.962v to 1.012v - we were able to maintain stability with a 770MHz core and memory running at an effective 3,900MHz. That's a boost of 10 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively.
We ran into on-screen artifacts when going any further, but we reckon users willing to provide more voltage and chassis air flow are likely to hit 800MHz on the core.
With our SuperDuper Overclock in place (denoted in the below graphs as "Gigabyte GTX 470 SOC+"), the card returns the following frame rates.
When overclocked, Gigabyte's custom card gets mighty close to GeForce GTX 480 territory.
Trouble is, power consumption takes a hit at these speeds - rising close to 400W - and system noise can be comprised for the sake of stability. The WindForce 3X cooler, albeit quiet the majority of the time, can become noisy when manually configured to run at ultra-high speeds.
