Conclusion
In this review today we focused on overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition video card. The goal was to find out how well this video card overclocks, how high we can get it, what kind of temperatures it produces and the power demand.
In this way, we will have a baseline we can use for all future retail custom video cards based on the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER GPU. We will be able to compare retail custom video card overclocks with what we achieved on the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition.
We can then see if custom retail video cards price premium makes sense for the benefits being offered over a Founders Edition design. After all, the custom cards are more expensive and we need to find out if the extra money spent makes sense when we review them.
Overclocking
Overclocking the Founders Edition was fairly easy, just load up MSI Afterburner and all the options we need are built-in. We were able to increase the Power Limit to +120, set a custom fan speed and had plenty of headroom with the slider options. We were also able to increase the voltage by +100.
In our testing, we found that the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER FE runs at a high clock speed, well beyond the 1770MHz boost clock by default. Playing games, we experienced it running faster than 1875MHz at all times, averaging around 1905MHz without even touching it. That is already a high clock speed considering the boost is 1770MHz.
Luckily, we did find that it had more headroom even without touching the voltage. We managed to push the core clock up to +130 with a high fan speed giving us 2040MHz consistent clock speed! That’s a nice bump in clock speed without even having to resort to overvolting.
When we applied more voltage, we managed to push it up even further to around 2055-2070MHz. At best it was 2070MHz, but at the lowest, it was 2055MHz with the voltage bumped up.
The memory was also very overclockable, up to 15,800MHz from 14,000MHz. This bumped the memory bandwidth up from 448GB/s to 505GB/s.
NVIDIA’s Founders Edition heatsink and axial fan design was not holding this video card back. Temperatures were great at default and overclocked. Even with the fan speed bumped up to 60-70% it was not annoying. You don’t need 100% fan speed to achieve the maximum overclock.
It seems adding more voltage is the key, and so we look forward to retail custom video cards with higher Power Limits if possible.
The overall performance gain was between 6-10% depending on the game.
Final Points
We look forward to finally testing retail custom video cards. The first one we’ll be reviewing is a GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER GPU based video card. With the data we’ve collected here today, we can now compare its overclocking results with the Founders Edition. We will see if its price premium makes sense and offers more than what you can get out of the Founders Edition.
With a 10% bump in performance the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER should come much closer to GeForce RTX 2080 performance, but much less money. An overclocked GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER could turn out to be a really great value. We will have to see how retail custom RTX 2070 SUPER cards turn out. Stay tuned.