Overclocking
Sapphire has been rather too conservative with respect to the out-of-the-box clocks. We have no such qualms about pushing the card further, in the interests of overclocking, and were pleasantly rewarded with substantially higher frequencies on both counts.
The above speeds were obtained without increasing the standard 1.15V coursing through the Sapphire's silicon veins. There's enough extra performance to eke ahead of the Palit GTX 770 OC and effectively close the gap to the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. The wider architecture of the Radeon R9 280X, meanwhile, still runs faster.
