Overclocking the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO
How do you overclock a MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO video card? Well before we begin to overclock, we need to find out the real-world in-game GPU frequency the video card is operating at by default. That way we can find what frequency we are overclocking from and how much gain we get in overclocking. Keep in mind that NVIDIA GPU Boost already adjusts the GPU frequency dynamically to utilize most of the potential that is there. This means it will already clock the GPU frequency well above the quoted Boost Clock even without overclocking.
Default Clock
The base clock on this video card is 1500MHz, which isn’t very helpful. More importantly, it is the GPU Boost Clock makes the difference and it is set at 1830MHz on the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO. This is 105MHz higher than the Founders Edition GPU Boost of 1725MHz.
The MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO averaged 1984Mhz during testing and maintained a temperature of 64 degrees Celsius. Comparing to the Founders Edition that averaged 1935MHz, the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO clocks 2.5% faster out of the box. Memory in both the Founders Edition and the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO is set to 14GHz using GDDR6 memory.
Highest Stable Overclock
To dial in the maximum overclock for the MSI GeForce RTX 3070 GAMING X TRIO, we used MSI’s Afterburner software that’s well known across the enthusiast community for making lots of knobs to turn and levers to pull available for tuning enjoyment.
We started by maxing the Power Target out at a mere 4% over default and cranking the fans up to 100%. This isn’t a very generous amount of extra power, but overall, it still allows for more power than the RTX 3070 Founders Edition let us play with. The voltage adjustment was locked within Afterburner, however, given the low power budgets on the RTX 30 Series that we have seen so far, adding voltage has not been necessary as it only increases power consumption and reduces how far GPU Boost will push the core clock speed up.
With the power matters settled, we started by pushing the core clock up as high as it could go without touching the memory side of the equation. We were able to pick up an extra 135 MHz on the slider offset before we started crashing.
Next up, we set the core back to stock and boosted the memory to see how far we could take it. Surprisingly enough, it was quite happy with +1500MHz (3000MHz effective) that happened to max out the available slider to us in Afterburner. This is a boost to 17GHz GDDR 6 over the stock of 14GHz GDDR6.
Putting it all together, we first tried our max individual clocks together to see how it worked. Initially, it seemed like it was going to be in the cards, but about three games into testing we found that we had to back off just a little bit to stabilize those games. This gave us a final stable overclock of 1635MHz core clock, 1935MHz boost clock and 17GHz memory clock.
Comparing the sustained GPU frequency to the stock frequency, we see that the observed overclocked frequency averaged out to 2076MHz. This is a 4.6% increase over the stock clocks and a 7.3% increase over the 3070 Founders Edition. The memory at 17GHz is 21.4% faster than the stock clock as well. This overclock dunks on what the Founders Edition can do and we could only hope for a higher power limit to get even more out of the little GPU that could.