NVIDIA Pascal Breaks 3GHz GPU Clock Barrier With Overclocked GALAX GTX 1060

NVIDIA hit a home run with its Pascal GPU architecture, which is a savory combination of performance and power efficiency. Depending on the part, there can be some impressive overclocking headroom available as well. That was certainly case when teams of overclockers armed with a GALAX GeForce GTX 1060 Hall of Fame (HOF) Edition graphics cards pushed Pascal past 3GHz, nearly doubling the card's base clock.

Pascal GPUs are already some of the highest clocked graphics chips in existence. Getting to 3GHz and beyond, however, is out of reach for the average person. It requires a willing card, overclocking know-how, and lots of liquid nitrogen—nobody's pushing Pascal to 3GHz on air.

The GALAX GeForce GTX 1060 HOF is proving to be a popular part among overclockers in pursuit of world records. Just last month, this same card hit 2.8GHz on LN2. Being able to goose the card even further is a testament both the experienced overclockers pushing Pascal and to Pascal's advanced FinFET node.


At stock, the GALAX GeForce GTX 1060 HOF sports a 1,620MHz base and 1,847MHz boost clockspeed. It also has 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8,000MHz on a 192-bit bus, giving it 192GB/s of memory bandwidth. Power is provided by 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors.

Three different teams managed to push the card beyond 3GHz. At that speed, the card's pixel fill rate (132.2GPixel/s) was higher than a stock clocked GeForce GTX 1080, while its texture fill rate (220.4GTexel/s) topped that of a GeForce GTX 1070. Not too shabby!

Pascal has been a game changer for NVIDIA and gamers alike. For the latter, Pascal represents the era of 4K gaming—it is no longer necessary to equip a high-end machine with multiple graphics cards for consistently smooth framerates when playing games at 4K. And for NVIDIA, it saw a 39 percent rise in GPU shipments last quarter thanks to strong Pascal sales.

Looking ahead, NVIDIA is planning to introduce a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphic cards based on Pascal, as evidenced by a recent job listing referencing the card. Exactly when isn't known, though rumor has it NVIDIA will announce the card at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.