What I have seen so far with Pascal overclocking is that there is a clock speed envelope you have to work within to get the most performance out of your cards. All four samples I have looked at have been in the 2050MHz to 2100MHz as the maximum sustained core clock speeds. For all the cool hardware on the MSI Gaming X 8G cards, the biggest impact comes from the cooling performance of the Twin Frozr VI cooling solution. Keeping the Pascal cores cool lets them run at higher average core clock speeds. As the temperature rises, the core clock speed starts to drop and it's visible when you look at the clock speed monitor in MSI's Afterburner application. Overclocking these Gaming X 8G cards with Afterburner is a little more time consuming when you are finding the max core clock speeds, but once you dial it in it is an easier tool to use than EVGA Precision. Precision gives you an automatic tuning tool that helps you find the best voltage/clock speed curve for your card. However, MSI has a second application that has three pre-defined overclocking profiles that make overclocking a push button affair. MSI's Gaming App lets you choose from an overclocked, gaming, or silent profile to meet your FPS/noise needs. If you want to really get creative you can download and play with the mobile Afterburner app.