Need help with EVGA 460 GTX
- Thread starter skept1k
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Vyrisus
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- May 31, 2013
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Overclocking any card properly is a constant give and take, push-pull process. What you want to do first is get a good program for it. In the case of the GTX460 I recommend MSI Afterburner. I also suggest getting a program such as Speedfan to monitor your temps. Finally, get Unigine Heaven benchmarking utility. It'll give you a good base to measure your OC performance gains and stability and it has an on-screen info readout so you can keep an eye on your temps during testing.
Overclocking at first is pretty simple. You basically want to make small incremental increases in your GPU core and memory, say 10 or 15 mhz at a time. Then run the benchmark utility and/or a couple stressful games on it and see how it does. If everything tests out well, then increase the core and mem another 15mhz and see how that works. You keep doing this until A. your driver crashes or B. you start getting artifacts like dots and smears and other things on your screen that don't belong there when you're playing a game. Once you hit this point, you dial back your settings a bit and that's where you hold it.
Where it gets tricky is you can start tweaking voltage and increasing that a little bit which oftentimes allows you to run the card at even higher clocks while remaining stable. But, raising voltage is something I wouldn't recommend until you've done a fair bit of research on your specific card's safe voltages and are very comfortable overclocking your card because increasing voltage is a good way to toast a card if you aren't careful.
Heat is the #1 enemy of OC'ing, and fermi cards like yours can produce a lot of heat as they aren't terribly power efficient. Make sure you make use of Afterburner's built-in gpu fan control and boost the fan speed to keep heat to a minimum. When I game with a high overclock I usually have my card's fan set to around 70%. Ideally, you want to keep your card's load temps around the 70's (C) or lower. These are just some general guidelines to get you started. Hope this helps.
Overclocking at first is pretty simple. You basically want to make small incremental increases in your GPU core and memory, say 10 or 15 mhz at a time. Then run the benchmark utility and/or a couple stressful games on it and see how it does. If everything tests out well, then increase the core and mem another 15mhz and see how that works. You keep doing this until A. your driver crashes or B. you start getting artifacts like dots and smears and other things on your screen that don't belong there when you're playing a game. Once you hit this point, you dial back your settings a bit and that's where you hold it.
Where it gets tricky is you can start tweaking voltage and increasing that a little bit which oftentimes allows you to run the card at even higher clocks while remaining stable. But, raising voltage is something I wouldn't recommend until you've done a fair bit of research on your specific card's safe voltages and are very comfortable overclocking your card because increasing voltage is a good way to toast a card if you aren't careful.
Heat is the #1 enemy of OC'ing, and fermi cards like yours can produce a lot of heat as they aren't terribly power efficient. Make sure you make use of Afterburner's built-in gpu fan control and boost the fan speed to keep heat to a minimum. When I game with a high overclock I usually have my card's fan set to around 70%. Ideally, you want to keep your card's load temps around the 70's (C) or lower. These are just some general guidelines to get you started. Hope this helps.
- May 11, 2013
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Your answer was extremely helpful and well written, I had been doing some more research in the time that I was waiting for a response and uncovered a lot of helpful information! I read an article on Guru3D that says the 460's are awesome cards for overclocking (lucky me! 
) They managed to get up to 30+ fps gains in some games after clocking the core to 800mhz, the shader at 1600 mhz, and the memory at 4000. The card never exceeded 40 Db and stayed at 73C temperature. I'm going to flash the BIOS on both cards with the FPB update, this way I can unlock the fan speeds to 100% (although I don't even think I'll need to go that high) I plan on OC'ing my i5k to at least 4.5ghz, so that should help a little with bottlenecking in some circumstances I think. I really appreciate your time, your response must have taken a little while to write up! Thanks a lot for your help!
If you can give me any more info here are my current specs:
1 - EVGA 460 GTX FPB (Free performance boost model, BIOs update allows for up to 100% fan control) GDDR5 768 mb (Will be getting a second EVGA 460 GTX 768mb GDDR5)
1 - MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
1 - Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I53570K
1 - Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Profile Desktop Memory Model BLS8G3D1609ES2LX0
2 - COOLER MASTER R4-BMBS-20PK-R0 Blade Master 120mm Case Fans
1 - CORSAIR Hydro series H50 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
1 - Rosewill BRONZE Series RBR1000-M 1000W Continuous@40°C, 80Plus Bronze Certified,Modular Cable Design,ATX12V v2.3/ EPS12V,SLI Ready,CrossFire Ready,Active PFC"Compatible with Core i7, i5" Power Supply
3 - 19" Hanns-G HW191D LCD Monitors (running 1440x900 resolution each, unsure of final resolution after all three are hooked up)
1 - Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (Comes with 1 top fan and one rear fan, both fully functional)
Also, here's a link to the article I read. I found it super helpful although they didn't mention anything about increasing the voltages.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_460_sl...
) They managed to get up to 30+ fps gains in some games after clocking the core to 800mhz, the shader at 1600 mhz, and the memory at 4000. The card never exceeded 40 Db and stayed at 73C temperature. I'm going to flash the BIOS on both cards with the FPB update, this way I can unlock the fan speeds to 100% (although I don't even think I'll need to go that high) I plan on OC'ing my i5k to at least 4.5ghz, so that should help a little with bottlenecking in some circumstances I think. I really appreciate your time, your response must have taken a little while to write up! Thanks a lot for your help! If you can give me any more info here are my current specs:
1 - EVGA 460 GTX FPB (Free performance boost model, BIOs update allows for up to 100% fan control) GDDR5 768 mb (Will be getting a second EVGA 460 GTX 768mb GDDR5)
1 - MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
1 - Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I53570K
1 - Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Profile Desktop Memory Model BLS8G3D1609ES2LX0
2 - COOLER MASTER R4-BMBS-20PK-R0 Blade Master 120mm Case Fans
1 - CORSAIR Hydro series H50 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
1 - Rosewill BRONZE Series RBR1000-M 1000W Continuous@40°C, 80Plus Bronze Certified,Modular Cable Design,ATX12V v2.3/ EPS12V,SLI Ready,CrossFire Ready,Active PFC"Compatible with Core i7, i5" Power Supply
3 - 19" Hanns-G HW191D LCD Monitors (running 1440x900 resolution each, unsure of final resolution after all three are hooked up)
1 - Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (Comes with 1 top fan and one rear fan, both fully functional)
Also, here's a link to the article I read. I found it super helpful although they didn't mention anything about increasing the voltages.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_460_sl...
Vyrisus
Honorable
- May 31, 2013
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Everything I see looks good. I have the GD55 version of your mobo and have had a great experience with it. Those are solid boards in general imo and so you made a good choice there. Also, even at stock speed, the 3570K wouldn't bottleneck the 460 and it definitely won't at 4.5Ghz.
One thing I will mention is that with the 768MB 460 models, you may not want to go with a crazy high res as you will become memory-starved in some of the more recent games if your resolution is too high. Depending on what you're going to be playing and what settings you are looking to achieve, I would say 1900X1200 (or 1920X1080) is the highest I would go, and a few games you may have to trim back to 1680X1050 (or 1600X900) even with the two cards, because the memory on the cards in SLI won't be exponential. You will still have an effective limit of 768MB.
But either way, you have a solid build there and I hope it serves you well
One thing I will mention is that with the 768MB 460 models, you may not want to go with a crazy high res as you will become memory-starved in some of the more recent games if your resolution is too high. Depending on what you're going to be playing and what settings you are looking to achieve, I would say 1900X1200 (or 1920X1080) is the highest I would go, and a few games you may have to trim back to 1680X1050 (or 1600X900) even with the two cards, because the memory on the cards in SLI won't be exponential. You will still have an effective limit of 768MB.
But either way, you have a solid build there and I hope it serves you well
renz496
Champion
- Jun 16, 2009
- 14,251
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fermi might not as energy efficient as cypress (amd 5k series) but that heat problem only problematic on GF100. other fermi chips like GF104 (GTX460) and below are quite good. almost all gtx460 able to get 800-850 for core w/o the need to increase the core voltage. on the memory side i heard that nvidia have a bit of problem with 400 series memory controller which ocing the memory can lead to instant crash so most people did not bothet ocing 400 series memory. personally i was able to get 900mhz stable with my gtx460. it is quite significant in performance improvement. my card was asus TOP edition though
- May 11, 2013
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Vyrisus :
Everything I see looks good. I have the GD55 version of your mobo and have had a great experience with it. Those are solid boards in general imo and so you made a good choice there. Also, even at stock speed, the 3570K wouldn't bottleneck the 460 and it definitely won't at 4.5Ghz.
One thing I will mention is that with the 768MB 460 models, you may not want to go with a crazy high res as you will become memory-starved in some of the more recent games if your resolution is too high. Depending on what you're going to be playing and what settings you are looking to achieve, I would say 1900X1200 (or 1920X1080) is the highest I would go, and a few games you may have to trim back to 1680X1050 (or 1600X900) even with the two cards, because the memory on the cards in SLI won't be exponential. You will still have an effective limit of 768MB.
But either way, you have a solid build there and I hope it serves you well
One thing I will mention is that with the 768MB 460 models, you may not want to go with a crazy high res as you will become memory-starved in some of the more recent games if your resolution is too high. Depending on what you're going to be playing and what settings you are looking to achieve, I would say 1900X1200 (or 1920X1080) is the highest I would go, and a few games you may have to trim back to 1680X1050 (or 1600X900) even with the two cards, because the memory on the cards in SLI won't be exponential. You will still have an effective limit of 768MB.
But either way, you have a solid build there and I hope it serves you well
Thanks man! I chose my parts pretty carefully and I thought it was a pretty good build, main reason I got the GD45 was because it was the best bang for my buck on Newegg, not to mention the board has a TON of awesome features, they gave me that 8gb DDR3 RAM for free with purchasing the board! Saved me a good $60
As far as the resolution goes I'm not quite sure what it's going to go up to as I've never used a multi-monitor setup before. Are there any other graphic options the take a tole on VRAM besides resolution? The most I'm going to be playing are older games that are 1990-2010, but I do still play quite a few higher end games like Metro 2033, Crysis, Battlefield, Neverwinter Online, Skyrim (Modded all to hell of course
), and sometime in the future The Elder Scrolls: Online. The main reason I'm using 3 monitors is so I have better overall vision of my surroundings in my FPS games, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal, Etc.I truly appreciate your help, if there is a way I can give Rep/Kudos to you or something along those lines then please let me know, you've earned it as far as I'm concerned
- May 11, 2013
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I'm planning on Overclocking both of my cards to at least 850mhz core, I don't I'll go any higher than that though, should be enough power haha. I appreciate you help and contribution. Just one of many reasons I plan on staying with this great community, plenty of help to go around!
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