Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Sunday , April 03, 2011
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ASUS GeForce GTX 590 Overclocking Follow-Up

We take the new ASUS GeForce GTX 590 and overclock the crap out of it! What are all these exploding GTX 590 cards about? We will find out just what happens when you crank it up with proper power management working on the GTX 590. We compare performance at stock clocks, overclocked, and against a 6990.

Introduction

On March 24th, 2011 NVDIA unveiled the fastest single video card NVIDIA has ever made, the GeForce GTX 590. We evaluated a retail version of the ASUS GeForce GTX 590 for the launch. NVIDIA claimed that this video card was the "world's fastest video card" but our tests revealed otherwise. In fact, performance was about on the level of GeForce GTX 570 SLI. When compared with the AMD Radeon HD 6990 we found the Radeon HD 6990 to perform faster in many games and provide a better gameplay experience.

We were not overly impressed with the performance considering the competition and the price. Our initial impression was that the performance of the GTX 590 is being held back because of clock speeds considering it has 512 CUDA cores (per GPU); same as a GTX 580. The obvious answer to this dilemma is to take matters into our own hands and do as enthusiasts do and overclock this best till it explodes. Naturally, we set about doing this, literally taking this video card to the extreme. However, the end result may surprise you.

Performance and Explosions

Quickly after the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 there came down many videos and tales of GTX 590 cards "burning up" and popping power circuitry when overclocking. The exploding GTX 590 cards happened because of one reason; some reviewers were not using the latest drivers for evaluation purposes. We always make sure we use the latest drivers as provided by NVIDIA when testing hardware, especially new hardware like this video card. Apparently, an earlier driver version (267.52) had faulty programming in the power management portion of the driver which caused the power management features on the GTX 590 to simply not work properly when over-volted. When people would crank the voltage up to 1.2v, or thereabouts, the video cards power circuitry couldn't handle it, and pop went the weasel.

The reason why some reviewers used that driver build is because it came bundled on the retail CDs in the retail packaged video cards at the time. In that respect, it is disheartening that manufacturers would allow a driver with faulty power management to be shipped with retail products. End users who install from CD and overclock their video card will be in for a surprise. Of course, one can also argue that any enthusiast who buys this video card should simply know to go to the website and download the latest drivers. This should just be common practice on any video card, never trust the CD, always go to the web and grab drivers.

When the appropriate drivers are being used the power management features work great. We used 267.71 ForceWare driver in our testing and found no problems at stock clocks or overclocked frequencies and voltages. In fact, we saw the power management features at play when we over-volted and increased frequencies. Performance actually degraded because the power management features were keeping the power in-check so the card wouldn't blow up. We can actually show this to you so you will see how this works.

Power Management Working Properly

In the graph below, we are running the GTX 590 at three difference settings. The blue line indicates running our GTX 590 at a slight upped yet stable .963v and 723MHz. This was our highest stable overclock we found, and shows what a stable consistent performance is all about. The yellow line represents the GTX 590 running at 1v and still the same 723MHz, so just a voltage bump, nothing else. The red line represents the video card running at a very high 1.05v and a higher 753MHz clock speed. Note that all of these settings ran without crashing or blowing up, and there is a reason why as you will see.

For the game setup we loaded up the map in Bad Company 2 and let the game sit at the first opening scene for an entire 20 minutes. Therefore, since nothing is happening, and we are just sitting still in one scene the framerates should remain steady and not fluctuate at all over time. If the framerates fluctuate, or degrade in performance, then power management is kicking in and keeping the video card from blowing up, while sacrificing performance to do it.

Article Image

So, what we see is that the blue line, indicating a stable and fast performance averaging around 80 FPS is completely consistent. The framerate doesn't fluctuate, and the min and max FPS are close together, between 79-81 FPS. This is the ideal performance profile, you do not want your games performance fluctuating at all.

Now look what happened when we simply raised the voltage from .963v to 1v at the same frequency, no other changes. The performance starts off the same for a few minutes, but then it takes a massive nosedive. Not only does it nosedive in performance, but the performance is fluctuating tremendously. The framerate swings from 66 FPS up to 81 FPS.

Things get even worse when we raise the voltage higher and increase the clock speed up to 753MHz. The performance tanks down to around 60 FPS and just stays there.

You would think that higher voltages and higher frequencies would equate to higher performance. However, because of the power management features keeping the video card in check, performance will degrade when those features come into play. In this case, overclocking to higher levels will actually harm performance. Therefore, the goal is to find a tame voltage and frequency increase with the GeForce GTX 590 in order to achieve the best performance. You simply cannot go wild with this video card because it will stop you from doing so.