After seeing what the reference GTX 980 was capable of in our launch review, I was really looking forward to working on the non-reference designs. That wait was worth it considering the clock speeds attained by simply pushing the sliders to the right in MSI's own Afterburner application. To reach the maximum clock speeds that this card would deliver on air, I set the power limit to the max level and started pushing the clock speeds. It's really as simple as bumping the speeds and then testing stability with a significant 3D load. I use a combination of looping Unigine's Heaven 4.0 test with the maximum settings at 1920x1080, then following up with some 3DMark testing. Using this slimmed down approach, I was able to bump the core clock speed turbo boost speed to 1525MHz, or about 75MHz higher than the reference card's overclock on both the memory and GPU core. Thanks to MSI's custom build and component selection, we get even higher clock speeds capable if you push the limits, and with cooler temperatures. By overclocking this card, I saw a nice 800+ point boost in 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme test.