What is Voltage and what does it do?

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aszumski98

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I am not a new to PC gaming, but I am new to overclocking. Just yesterday I overclocked my GTX 1070 to 2025 Mhz Core Clock and 4300 Mhz Memory Clock and I didn't mess with voltage. Can anyone explain to me what does voltage do with overclocking and is it safe?
 
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atomicWAR
increasing the voltage can help you increase your overclock headroom. There are downsides though.

1. It increases heat and therefore can limit your boost speeds
2. Can shorten the lifespan of your chip
3. Done incorrectly (heck even done correctly) it can fry your chip and make it an expensive paper weight.

Only over-volt if you have proper cooling and the thermal headroom to do it. IE your chip runs very cool (<80C under full load) and/or your using exotic cooling like water cooling and can keep the chips temp down.

As a newb to overclocking I urge you to stick with OC without touching your voltages.
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atomicWAR

atomicWAR

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increasing the voltage can help you increase your overclock headroom. There are downsides though.

1. It increases heat and therefore can limit your boost speeds
2. Can shorten the lifespan of your chip
3. Done incorrectly (heck even done correctly) it can fry your chip and make it an expensive paper weight.

Only over-volt if you have proper cooling and the thermal headroom to do it. IE your chip runs very cool (<80C under full load) and/or your using exotic cooling like water cooling and can keep the chips temp down.

As a newb to overclocking I urge you to stick with OC without touching your voltages.
 
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TJ Hooker

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It controls what voltage level is used to power the GPU. After a certain point, your GPU will become unstable (you'll see visual glitches or crashes) if you keep increasing frequency. Increasing voltage helps stabilize things at higher frequencies. The downside is that increasing voltage causes power consumption (and therefore heat) to increase pretty quickly, more so than increasing frequency. Also, higher voltages can in theory shorten the lifespan of the GPU, even if it's being kept cool.

That being said, you're typically pretty limited in how much you're able to increase the voltage (short of getting a modded BIOS or something), so any voltage that you set using a typical overclocking utility is unlikely to do any harm. Although if you're not sure what you're doing it may be best to just leave voltage alone.
 
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atomicWAR

atomicWAR

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they are correct in the "it's unlikely to do harm". I was just giving you the full list of possibilities. Regardless I still urge you to stick to stock voltage overclock as you have. If you get into water cooling then you may want to play around with your voltages a bit more.
 
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mcnumpty23

mcnumpty23

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if its not the reference cooler adding the 100mv or whatever it allows isnt going to make much more heat

though it also might not give any higher speed any way

the gpu is far safer to add voltage to than the cpu as the cpu does allow adding too much voltage

as long as your temperatures arent near the thermal throttling adding the extra 100mv etc will be fine
 
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