Default GPU Frequency
Before we look at performance, we need to find out the actual real-world gaming frequency the video card performs. With both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs today, the GPU frequency is very dynamic. What may be quoted as the “Boost Clock” is not necessarily the performance it will actually run at. Typically, GPUs today can exceed the “Boost Clock” dynamically. We need to find out what it actually runs at, in this way we can see how well things like cooling, and power headroom are working.
To do this we will record the GPU clock frequency over time while playing a game. We use Cyberpunk 2077 for this with a very long manual run-through at “Ultra” settings. We also record GPUz sensor data to look at GPU temperature, Voltage, and Power.
The default GPU Boost on the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is 1770MHz. This is what we have set at the lowest line in the graph. You can see that while gaming the actual GPU Boost frequency scales very high at first, and then settled down to around 1875MHz while gaming. It dipped down to only 1860MHz at the lowest. The average was 1884MHz. This shows that the frequency stays above the quoted boost speed of about 6% while gaming.
GPUz sensor data shows a GPU Temperature of 76C, and a Hot Spot temp of 86.6C. This is with the fans spinning on automatic at 50%. GPU Voltage maxed out at 1.0810V.
