OVERCLOCKING
As we’ve shown you earlier, GTX 1070 Sea Hawk X suffers from a rather high clock frequency fluctuation. Normally all it takes to get rid of this problem is to raise TDP limit. This is not possible with the Sea Hawk, since the maximum TDP is 105% in BIOS. This means that we are just adding frequency to the card that is already capped by the power limit. However clock speed will still increase as games normally do not utilize 100% of GPU power, so there’s still room for overclocking.
In the end, we managed to increase the frequency by 150 MHz on the core and 400 MHz on the memory.
So here are all profiles and their clocks.
| OVERCLOCKING RESULTS | ||||
| Reference : | 1506 MHz | 1683 MHz | ~ | 2002 MHz |
| Silent Mode : | 1506 MHz | 1696 MHz | 1802 MHz | 2002 MHz |
| Gaming Mode : | 1586 MHz | 1772 MHz | 1869 MHz | 2002 MHz |
| OC Mode : | 1607 MHz | 1797 MHz | 1886 MHz | 2027 MHz |
| Manual Overclocking : | 1732 MHz | 1922 MHz | 2024 MHz | 2102 MHz |
| BASE CLOCK | BOOST CLOCK | AVG CLOCK | MEMORY CLOCK | |
As you can see there’s not much of a difference between Gaming and OC Mode. Silent mode is essentially what you would expect from a reference-clocked card. Manual overclocking gave us on average 155 MHz more than Gaming mode.
As you might expect higher clock comes at the price of higher temperature, but that part was covered in our stability test, earlier in this review. Here I will only show you how manual overclocking affects fan curvature when applied. It was not modified, this is simply how GPU responds to higher temperature. Of course, let me remind you, this is just the blower fan on the card, not the fan on the radiator.
| Review Contents | |
|---|---|
| Page 1 | Overview MSI GeForce GTX 1070 SEA HAWK X |
| Page 2 | Testing platform & methodology |
| Page 3 | STABILITY Temperature ● Core Clock ● GPU Usage ● Memory Usage |
| Page 4 | DirectX 12 Battlefield 1 |
| Page 5 | DirectX 11 Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare |
| Page 6 | DirectX 12 Deus Ex: Mankind Divided |
| Page 7 | DirectX 12 The Division |
| Page 8 | DirectX 12 HITMAN |
| Page 9 | DirectX 11 Metro: Last Light |
| Page 10 | DirectX 11 Project Cars |
| Page 11 | DirectX 11 Rainbow Six: Siege |
| Page 12 | DirectX 11 Titanfall 2 |
| Page 13 | DirectX 12 Rise of the Tomb Raider |
| Page 14 | DirectX 12 Total War: Warhammer |
| Page 15 | DirectX 11 Witcher 3 |
| Page 16 | Overclocking |
| Page 17 | Conclusion |
