Overclocking GeForce GTX 480 with extra GPU voltage

The GeForce GTX 400 series definitely has been topic of much discussion. Though extremely powerful this graphics card runs hot and is rather loud. Now these sure are lackluster factors .. but that doesn't mean the product doesn't have any further potential. Contrary as today's article will show there's in fact a lot of additional performance to be found in the GeForce GTX 480, that's if you know how to tweak it properly. Today we'll touch the holy grail over overclocking, voltage tweaking.

Yesterday we released an update of AfterBurner, we implemented and thus added voltage control for the 470/480 cards in MSI AfterBurner revision 1.6.0 beta 4 and upwards.

You can use MSI AfterBurner with ANY brand GeForce GTX 480, trust me when I say, the card are all the same and partners have purchased them from NVIDIA directly.

Now as you guys probably know the default clock frequency for the GeForce GTX 480 is 700 MHz on the core, 1400 MHz on the shader domain and 3700 MHz on the memory. With an additional voltage we where able to push close to 850 MHz on the core and roughly 1700 MHz on the shader processor domain.

The first group of people that will really benefit from what we'll show you today are the people that opt a liquid cooled GeForce GTX 470 or 480 as they will be in control of noise levels and get much better GPU temperatures. As such they should be able to, fairly straightforward, get another 15 to 20% performance out of the card. Do you want to see how we do it ? Well read the next couple of pages with a step-by-step guide and then we'll show some results based on our overclock experience.

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