ASUS ENGTS450 TOP Overclocking

Overclocking the ASUS ENGTS450 TOP was a challenge. There wasn't much headroom left, which comes as no surprise considering this is the highest-clocked GTS 450 ASUS has put out. I did try increasing the voltage, made possible thanks to the upgraded VRM and Smart Doctor Software, but it didn't appear to have much effect. After several rounds of tweaking and stability testing, I settled on the speeds you see below.

At 945MHz, the GPU overclocked to roughly 2% higher than the stock speed for the ENGTS450 TOP and 21% higher than NVIDIA's reference design. The memory managed 4200MHz, a 5% increase over the ENGTS450 TOP and 16% over reference. I could have pushed it higher and still made it through the benchmarks, but at the cost of severe artifacting and possible damage over time. That said, here are the benchmark results of the stable clock speeds I was able to achieve:

With an average increase of only 3.4%, it's clear ASUS is already pushing this card fairly hard. Still, some will want those extra percent. Personally, though, I'd rather have the long-term stability of the stock overclock. Sure, you may never have a problem running at the higher speeds, but for such a small increase I'd rather stick with speeds that I know are going to hold up over time and are guaranteed by warranty.

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