Overclocking the EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING
How do you overclock an EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING video card?
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 that makes the difference and it is set at 1770MHz on the EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING. This is 45MHz higher than the Founders Edition GPU Boost of 1725MHz.
The EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING settled in at 1935Mhz during testing and maintained a temperature of 67 degrees Celsius. Comparing to the Founders Edition that averaged 1935MHz, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING is on equal footing even though it has a higher boost clock. Memory in both the Founders Edition and the EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING is set to 14GHz using GDDR6 memory.
Highest Stable Overclock
To dial in the maximum overclock for the EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 XC3 ULTRA GAMING, we used EVGA’s Precision X1 software that makes lots of knobs to turn and levers to pull available for tuning enjoyment.
We started by maxing out the Power Target at 113% and boosted the GPU Temp Target up from 83C to 90C. We then cranked the fans up to 100%. There was not a knob present for modifying voltage, 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 170 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. It appeared to be happiest at +800MHz (1600MHz effective). This is a boost to 15.6GHz 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 1670MHz core clock, 1940MHz boost clock, and 15.6GHz memory clock.
Comparing the sustained GPU frequency to the stock frequency, we see that the observed overclocked frequency averaged out to 2145MHz. This is a 10.8% increase over the stock clocks and stock Founders Edition performance. The memory at 15.6GHz is 11.4% faster than the stock clock as well.