Overclocking the TITAN X

Aug 13, 2016 by Mark Poppin in Featured

Intro

This overclocking evaluation is the fourth of our Pascal TITAN X series. After introducing it ten days ago, we compared it with the GTX 1080 and found that the TITAN X was generally 20-30+% faster. Then we compared the last generation 28nm Maxwell TITAN X with the new 16nm Pascal version and found that the Pascal TITAN X is at least 60% faster. Now we want to overclock the TITAN X as far as we can to see how well it scales with 25 games.The new TITAN X is Nvidia’s fourth GeForce GPU based on 16nm Pascal architecture. It is much faster than the GTX 1080 which was until recently, the world’s fastest video card. The TITAN X is premium-priced at $1200, and it is also a hybrid card that is well-suited for Single Precision and Deep Learning compute programs.

Instead of repeating all of the same information in our TITAN X introduction, we are instead going to highlight its specifications. The TITAN X is based on GP102 with a total of 3584 CUDA cores and it comes equipped with 12GB of GDDR5X for scientific applications and also for extreme resolutions in gaming. The TITAN X also features 11 TFLOPs FP32 Peak Single Precision performance and also has a new INT8 instruction set for deep learning inference. The TITAN X is still a gaming card, and it supports the same features of the other Pascal GPUs. Pascal delivers high clock speeds while using relatively little power – the GeForce TITAN X runs over 1.5 GHz with a TDP of 250W.

We received a TITAN X for evaluation from Nvidia together with a WQHD 34″ 3440×1440 ACER Predator X34 (21:9) G-SYNC display. Popularly called “2K”, super-widescreen WQHD has been added to our standard 3840×2160 and 2560×1440 benching resolutions instead of 1920×1080 as it is meaningless for powerful cards such as the TITAN X

Our testing platform is Windows 10 Home 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-6700K at 4.00GHz which turbos to 4.4GHz for all cores as set in the ASRock Z7170 motherboard’s BIOS, and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 at 3000MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the TITAN X clocks being tested. We are featuring all 25 games of our benchmark suite, and we are also including four DX12 games – Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Total War Warhammer – plus Futuremark’s recently released DX12 benchmark, Time Spy.

How well does the TITAN X Overclock?

The TITAN X is a 12-billion transistor 250W TDP chip which should tend to overclock less than the smaller and lower-TDP GPUs of the Pascal family. We are going to look the performance of the stock TITAN X compared with it overclocked as far as it can go with up to 100% fan speeds using MSI’s latest beta version of Afterburner. We are also using a new feature recently added to BTR’s reviews with this TITAN X series – percentages of difference between the stock and overclocked results.

We are going to concentrate only on overclocking the TITAN X. AMD’s flagship, the Fury X, is slower than the GTX 1080 and in our ongoing tests, it has failed to win a single benchmark. The TITAN X is in a class even higher than the GTX 1080, and it might be better to compare the TITAN X performance with Fury X CrossFire or with GTX 1070 SLI. AMD is pinning their hopes on next year’s big chip, Vega.

Let’s check out the test configuration.