Conclusion
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition was launched in March 2025 at an MSRP of $549, and provides a mainstream option for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 50 Series Blackwell architecture GPUs for 2025. It is now November 2025, and many new driver revisions have come, including new game releases that were not tested at the time. In our overclocking review guide, we wanted to test the overclocking potential of the GeForce RTX 5070 and see how it can improve performance in the latest games at 1440p.
In this review, we took the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition and overclocked it as high as possible to see that potential. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition runs at the NVIDIA reference GPU Boost clock speed of 2412MHz, and thus provides a good look at the potential performance gain when pushing the overclock for this series. We were able to increase Voltages, fan speeds, and hone in on the highest possible gameplay experience at 1440p.
Overclocking Experiences
Overclocking the GeForce RTX 5070 FE was simple with MSI Afterburner. It had all the options we needed to overclock with the Founders Edition, including Power Target, Voltage Control, and Fan Speed options. It also had plenty of headroom on the memory and GPU clock sliders to experiment with. It is important to download the right software for your brand and model of video card, as the right software can expose specific features of that video card, including RGB.
The Power Target is a very important component to overclocking NVIDIA GPUs, and different brands and models will have different levels available to them. On our Founders Edition GeForce RTX 5070, we could raise the Power Target by 10%. This is a middle-ground for overclocking the Power Target; there will be some cards with lesser ability, and some with higher, and higher ability in this area is better. With a TDP of 250W, a 10% increase in power is 275W maximum potential.
Our Founders Edition GeForce RTX 5070 was able to have its Voltage increased as well for the GPU, but again not all video cards will, so if you want that extra ability for experimenting, make sure it supports that. In our case, we could increase it by +100 or 100%. We found that overclocking the Voltage does give us a slight edge on the highest clock speed possible. Of course, the cost to that is more heat, more power, and possible lifespan reduction on the GPU as you are pushing it harder. Therefore, we found an alternative overclock without adding Voltage on the GeForce RTX 5070.
The highest overclock we achieved was with the Voltage at +100 and the GPU Clock at +400. This allowed a real-world in-game frequency overclocking average of 3164MHz, which is a 15% GPU Clock frequency overclock compared to the default 2755MHz in-game clock frequency at default. Alternatively, if you wish to forgo Voltage increases, you can set +430 to the GPU Clock frequency, and that allows an overclock of 3158MHz average. On the memory side of things, we were able to push that up to 30Gbps from the default 28Gbps. That improved memory bandwidth from 672GB/s to 720GB/s of memory bandwidth. While we could leave the fan on automatic, with the Voltage increased setting, an 80% fan speed helps keep the GPU cool.
Final Points
The potential on our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 for overclocking turned out to be 3164MHz GPU frequency and 30Gbps VRAM frequency. This is just shy of 3.2GHz for the Founders Edition. We feel that add-in-board custom video cards might well be able to hit 3.2GHz with their overclocks. Consider potential higher power targets and cooling.
It is possible that 3.2GHz could be the potential to look for on custom video cards. Otherwise, 3.1GHz as a baseline is a good and safe average overclock to expect on the GeForce RTX 5070. This should give you a good idea of what baseline to expect from overclocking. Memory will also be dependent; ours could overclock from 28Gbps to 30Gbps, but some others might be able to hit 31Gbps, but 30Gbps is a good baseline.
The expectations for gaming performance increases seem to be around 10% on average, for both native resolution and DLSS Upscaling. We saw some outliers and a couple of games that use Ray Tracing that received a 12-13% gameplay advantage. In games that were unplayable at higher settings, the overclocking advantage wasn’t enough to change the playable experience. However, there were a few cases where it did help smooth out performance at native resolution in situations that were near 60FPS without overclocking, at native resolution.
Overall, it wasn’t as much of an advantage as we had thought it would be, considering the large GPU Clock speed increase. It is obvious though some games receive a bigger advantage than others, and that is typically with games that have native or always-on Ray Tracing. As always, “silicon lottery” and the brand and model of video card you purchase will determine the overclocking potential. At least from this, you can see what an average overclock may result in terms of gameplay performance increases in the latest games. As it stands, the GeForce RTX 5070 can benefit from an overclock in specific games. It is possible to get an overclock that doesn’t stress power or temperature easily with the GeForce RTX 5070 FE.