Overclocking
The GTX 980 HOF offers excellent out-the-box performance, but the shipping specification is merely a starting point. This is a card designed with overclocking in mind and it responded well to our persuasion. With little effort and no added voltage, we had the base and boost clocks ramped-up to 1,410MHz and 1,524MHz, respectively, while memory topped-out at an effective 7,960MHz.
Such numbers reinforce the belief that Galax is using cherry-picked GPUs for the HOF range. Taking things up another notch for enthusiast users, a third-party voltage adjustment tool can also be used to push these cards further. According to Galax, over 1.5GHz should be possible on air, while LN2 users could hit speeds of over 2.1GHz.
We're not quite willing to pour LN2 on our test platform, yet even at these air-cooled speeds the GTX 980 HOF is easily able to shatter the 13,000-point barrier in 3DMark.
