Better to buy an overclocked card vs stock?

It is all about price points and consumer demand.

Someone may not be able to afford a GTX580 but has enough change for an overclocked GTX570.

Stock cards are great. They are the cheapest option for most people who may not be as concerned with squeezing 1 more fps out of a card. Others like to buy stock and overclock it themselves.


Overclocked cards generally have a higher Core and Shader clock speeds. However you have the potential to have a louder and hotter card than a stock solution. Vendors try to counter this by adding there own cooling solutions. Some vendors do a good job others not so much.

A super clocked 570 may be comparable to a 580 in some benchmarks but at the end of the day it has less stream processors or less through put than a 580.

Hope that helps a little

Simple Answer OC570 > stock 580.

Longer answer... for $100 you can have a stock 580 with the head room to overclock more than the 570. The 570 is basically at the safe ceiling.

The 580 also has a little more vram. This would help with games such as BF3 that love vram.

At the end of the day the higher end cards are less bang for your buck. You pay exponentially more money for smaller increases in performance gains.

If you are happy with a $370 card running at speed of a $470 card then by all means purchase it.