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What's the point of OC editions?

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Where did you get the numbers for Actual 3D performance gained from overclocking?
Same place you did... TPU reviews. In the overclock section. I brought up each card and looked in the overclocking section to find that line.
 
You are talking about extreme overclocking with hardware mods so something that not even 0.1% users do and it doesn't go anywhere out of competitive benchmarking. Even top OC series have locked power limits, voltages, or OCP/OVP or something else that limit their OC. To get a graphics card like the Kingpin series you have to pay way too much to be worth it and without additional mods, it still won't OC much higher than a cheaper series.

All new AMD and Nvidia graphics cards overclock about 3-7%, regardless of series. This situation remains without changes for about 3 generations. The exception are higher binned chips but manufacturers already sell them as special OC versions and from their factory OC clock they won't OC much higher. Afaik most (count 90%) of Ampere GPUs are already from higher bins and at least anytime soon won't be any better.

Maybe I missed something but for last gen cards, BIOS mods were not really possible and cross flashing required exactly the same memory chips or other components so it work right. It was like manufacturers were delivering special OC BIOS versions to some of their sponsored overclockers to make some noise.

On a standard BIOS for most GPUs (AMD and Nvidia), the GPU frequency slider in OC software is ending at 3-10%. The power limit is usually up to 20%+ but it doesn't mean it works like that or the card requires +20% to get 3-5% higher performance. In the same time a higher power causes the card to heat up more and if the cooler can't take it, then the maximum boost clock is lower so OC is usually a waste of time.




In some reviews like on TPU there are results with OC gains. Frequency and performance gains are at about 5-7% for 20 series Nvidia and about 3-4% for 30 series. I also feel like Earthdog tested his sample(s) so has some of his results for comparison.
Cross flashing is easy. I cross flashed my card which boosted the power limit from 112% to 124%. If you have an external flashing tool you can flash a fully custom BIOS directly to the card which will completely unlock the card. No power limit and voltage control upto 1.24v. Also, you can manually increase voltage with hardware mods.
 
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