New Nintendo Switch performance gains shown with overclock on eve of rumored Switch 2 announcement

The Nintendo Switch is over 7 years old now, and the company has yet to officially announce the successor. While the second-gen gaming handheld is confirmed to be announced within this fiscal year, its rumored specs hint that it won't be a powerhouse.

As for the first-gen Switch, its hardware is very dated as well, especially when compared to modern gaming handhelds like the ROG Ally and Legion Go (curr. $499 on Amazon). However, the Nvidia Tegra X1 inside it does have the potential to offer more. In previous overclocked tests, YouTuber Naga showed that the SoC can offer a better gaming experience with some extra push.

Now, Naga has put the extremely overclocked Nintendo Switch to another set of tests. In the full overclocked configuration, the YouTuber has bumped the clocks of the CPU to 2,805 MHz, GPU to 1,420 MHz, and memory to 3,200 MHz. For comparison, at stock, the clock speeds are 2,397 MHz, 1,228 MHz, and 2,133 MHz, respectively.

Worth noting that Naga has also upgraded the RAM of the gaming handheld from 4 GB to 8 GB. Moreover, the YouTuber has put the OLED variant of the gaming handheld to the test with these overclocks. However, you would get the same results from a non-OLED Nintendo Switch as both have identical hardware inside.

Regarding the performance boost, at stock configuration, the gaming handheld got 374 in single-core and 1,098 in multi-core tests of Geekbench 6. On the other hand, with the overclocks in place, it scored 446 and 1,409 points, respectively. In Glmark2, the stock achieved 3,115 points, while the fully overclocked configuration scored 4,723 points.

Naga also ran GravityMark, and the overclocked Nintendo Switch got a score of 5,170, while the stock got 3,770 points. The overclocks also made the gaming handheld score reasonably high in Cuda95 and Membench when compared to the stock.

Another interesting bit shared on the video is how well the overclocked Switch can emulate GameCube games through the Dolphin emulator. Naga only tested Mario Kart, and at stock, the FPS stays around 30. With the overclocks, the handheld can emulate at around 60 FPS. You can learn more by watching the video attached below.