Is this an okay overclock for ASUS STRIX GTX 970 (GPU Tweak II)?

nDeavour

Honorable
Oct 29, 2013
19
0
10,510
Hey all, this is my first time attempting to lightly overclock a GPU :

GPU Boost Clock: 1400 (Reaches 1489 under stress)

Max GPU Voltage: Stock 1175 (Reaches 1212 under stress)

Memory Clock: 7600 (Reaches 7604 under stress)

Power Target: 110% (Reaches 113-115% under stress, but mostly stays under 110%)

GPU Temp Target (Celcius): Stock 79 (Hovers around 68-70 under stress)

___________________________________

Compared to the stock "Gaming" settings:

+~8fps .... Sniper Elite V2 Benchmarks

+141 score (total 1541), +5.6fps, +14.2 max fps, -1.2 min fps? .... Heaven 4.0 Benchmark [8x AA]

+233 score (total 2681), +5.6fps, +14.5 max fps, +2.1 min fps .... Valley 1.0 Benchmark [2x AA]

___________________________________

Do these figures look alright? And in terms of the life span of the card, would I expect to see a noticeable difference?

So I guess my next step would be to continue increase the clock speeds until the card becomes unstable? My end goal is to achieve the highest OC on the stock voltage (to preserve GPU life span), but I might not actually go through with it for awhile.

 
Solution
Looks about right.

Just a note, you won't have any control over voltage on that card unless you hardware mod it. So you can only use the stock voltage. Pretty much every Maxwell card has a maximum default voltage of 1.212V (mine 980 is the same), the actual voltage is usually a little less. How much less is unknown unless you want to measure it with a DMM.

Your biggest enemy here will be heat. Keep an eye on it, so far your temps are pretty good. If you aren't already using a custom fan profile, you may want to look into that.

As for overclocking, it's always better to find the maximum overclock for each clock independently. Usually the core clock is going to give you the most bang for the MHz. Put the Power Limit to 125%...
Looks about right.

Just a note, you won't have any control over voltage on that card unless you hardware mod it. So you can only use the stock voltage. Pretty much every Maxwell card has a maximum default voltage of 1.212V (mine 980 is the same), the actual voltage is usually a little less. How much less is unknown unless you want to measure it with a DMM.

Your biggest enemy here will be heat. Keep an eye on it, so far your temps are pretty good. If you aren't already using a custom fan profile, you may want to look into that.

As for overclocking, it's always better to find the maximum overclock for each clock independently. Usually the core clock is going to give you the most bang for the MHz. Put the Power Limit to 125% which is the maximum allowed. So start by raising your core clock with the memory clock at default. Test every time you raise it. Something like 3DMark or Unigine will work. Keep raising it until you experience any type of instability. You may not, the card will lower it's clock to stay within the power and temp windows. So if you see the core clock throttling down, you've hit the limit of what your card can do. This can happen even though you aren't experiencing any instability. nVidia was pretty conservative with PowerTune.

Once you've found your max core clock, note that frequency and then return it to default. Then start on your memory clock. Same procedure here. In all likelihood, you will get to a point where you experience problems as raising the memory clock doesn't affect power usage and temperature very much. So here you may start to experience artifacting or games crashes, crashes to desktop, driver unresponsive messages. Once you've found the maximum mem clock return everything to default.

Bringing it all together. It's unlikely that you will be able to just set both to the maximums that you've found. So firstly, like I said the core clock is the more important of the two. So set the core clock to the maximum you found. Then set the memory clock for about 66 - 75% of the maximum overclock you found for the memory and test. If it's stable, keep creeping the memory clock up until you start having problems, or PowerTune starts down clocking the core clock. You will probably see PowerTune start down clocking the core clock. Even though I said memory overclocking doesn't affect the power usage much, it does contribute, so if the power limit is reached, PowerTune will lower the core clock. This is something you don't want, so just below that point is where you'll want to leave your memory clock.

Hope that helps.
 
Solution

nDeavour

Honorable
Oct 29, 2013
19
0
10,510
Wow, thanks for the in-depth info that actually helps a lot.

The only concern for me is whether using such a high power limit will be okay for my system, since my PSU is 550w (Corsair RMx) and I've already OC'd my 6600k to 4.2GHz.
 
The power limit is just telling the driver what the maximum power the card is allowed to use (TDP). The rated TDP for a 970 is 145W, so setting it to 125% means that PowerTune will let it use ~181W, so less than 40W more. Whether you have enough room is really up the quality of the supply you use and how much load the CPU and GPU are at any given time. Most games won't push all the cores to 100%, in fact that rarely happens.

Making some guesses about your system based on the average gaming system, I used a PSU calculator and it recommends a 495W supply with the overclocks you have now. So there is a little wiggle room. However it's very unlikely you're drawing the 445W it says you would at maximum.

The only thing I can say is test it. I can't give any definitive answers. Sure it would be nice to have a little more headroom, but that's not to say that it won't work. If your primary use for this computer is gaming, I think you'd benefit more from an overclock on the GPU than the CPU. You are definitely not going to be CPU bound in any game on the default clock of the 6700K and it's likely going to be that way for years.
 

nDeavour

Honorable
Oct 29, 2013
19
0
10,510
I see.

Could I perhaps use a power meter and measure the power draw of my system during a stress test (such as Heaven)? Would that be able to accurately tell me how much headroom I have?
 
It'll be close enough. Your PSU isn't 100% efficient, so there is power loss in the PSU that is not being transferred to the computer components. This power loss isn't part of your system draw, but it will be measured at the wall. So for instance lets say you are seeing 350W (this is quite a lot) at the wall. You have a good idea of the efficiency of your PSU at that draw range (look at in depth reviews), but lets say it's 89% just for shits and giggles. So only 89% of the total power draw at the wall is being used by your computer. So in this example your computer would be drawing ~312W out of the advertised 550W that your PSU can deliver.

Now the benchmark Heaven is great at putting a strain on your GPU, but it puts next to nothing on the CPU. You might want to run something like Prime 95 (non-AVX) concurrently. This will give you a worse case scenario. Gaming will not draw as much as these two run together. You will be surprised how little power this is. I did it my self, though I measure the draw via my UPS software.
 

nDeavour

Honorable
Oct 29, 2013
19
0
10,510
Oh boy, yes I almost forgot about the fact that it's not 100% efficient. That would have caused a little confusion!

All things considered, I think I'll be going down the power meter route then (since they're pretty cheap anyway). Hopefully I'll be able to get a nice overclock going. :) Thanks for all the great info.
 


No problem. I think you'll be surprised about how little power your system uses when you are pushing it like that. I was. I thought for sure I'd be seeing 400 - 500W, but it was less than 300W and I was running Prime95 with AVX and either Heaven or Valley. I've got a 4770K and a GTX980.

However there is one thing to consider. The meter and my UPC are slow, so the reading is averaged, it doesn't measure instantaneous power draw. So you may have quick power spikes that the meter won't be able to read.