ASUS' GPU Tweak / Overclocking Results
ASUS GPU Tweak
Like many other graphics card manufacturers, ASUS has their own overclocking software suite. Dubbed GPU Tweak, it may not be as well known as the EVGA Precisions and MSI Afterburners of this world but it is just as functional and actually works quite well. By eschewing the unnecessary frills and oddities of some other tweaking software like Gigabyte’s ill-fated SoC Tuner, GPU Tweak puts every one of the necessary functions within reach. The only exception to this is the Voltage and Power offsets on GTX 600-series cards which have to be manually enabled through a secondary Advanced Settings screen.
ASUS has also used a variation on GPU-Z which shows all of the pertinent information about your card, its software and clock speeds. The left hand side shows GPU monitoring information and is remarkably well fleshed out with a nearly endless list of items that can be enabled or disabled.
Like many other monitoring / tweaking programs GPU Tweak looks a lot like the old Rivatuner software so it acts very much the same as the older Precision and MSI’s Afterburner. Nonetheless, ASUS has nailed it with their implementation but if we had one bit of critique it would have to be the lack of information when you place your cursor over an icon. We would have appreciated a dialog box explaining each icon’s function before clicking on it since there are a few which can have unintended consequences if they’re haphazardly clicked. We also liked ASUS' addition of a dedicated vBIOS update utility which should come in handy for anyone that wants to load a custom BIOS onto the TOP.
Before getting onto the results, we do have some house cleaning to attend to. When buying this card and installing the software, make sure you use the latest version of ASUS’ GPU Tweak since the one included on the CD caused graphics corruption and crashes.
Overclocking Results
Ironically, regardless of ASUS’ claims to the contrary, our sample didn’t overclock all that well, stopping short (it hit a
core speed of 1311MHz) of the mark set by Gigabyte’s OC version, at least at its default voltage.
With about
100mV of extra voltage, We hit 1359MHz on the core and 6424MHz on the memory, both of which are decent results but somehow we were expecting a bit more, especially when it came to GPU Tweak. We ran straight into a clock speed wall which couldn’t be passed due to an artificial limit being placed by NVIDIA in their VBIOS. With that being said, we routinely saw the core reaching the 1.43GHz mark provided the Power Limit was pegged at the maximum 117%.
If ASUS wants to bill this card as overclocker-friendly, they need to raise or eliminate this limit altogether since it can be easily achieved without much in the way of voltage tweaking. At least give us the option to go to 1.5GHz.