Am I lucky or is this normal?

UniformGreen

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Feb 9, 2015
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So I found out my GTX 970 (I bought it on september last year, so it's not that old) has 74.3% ASIC, with an avg. of 69.9%. I tried to OC my GPU (MSI GTX 970 4GB Armour 2X). The stock speed for the GPU is 1102MHz, OC'ed to 1241 and it goes to 1316 with Boost. I managed to OC it to 1.5GHz and it's stable as fck. No artifacts, low temps (avg of 75C with 75% fan speed on the new Unigine benchmark, runned 3 times). The artifacts appear only at 250MHz OC (some random collors and flares appear on the screen). My questions are: am I lucky or 1.5GHz is quite normal on GTX 970's? And, is it stable to run 1.5GHz if I don't get artifacts?
 
Solution
if temperatures on gpu and vrms are this stable, yes it is a good overclock

just remember form time to time to check for temperature variations and when you can, add another fan pushing cold air inside the case to improve even more the temperatures inside the case to it remains stable

not all gpus can overclock this well, so perhaps you are lucky, untillsomeone comes saying that reached 1550mhz, such is life :D

atljsf

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if temperatures on gpu and vrms are this stable, yes it is a good overclock

just remember form time to time to check for temperature variations and when you can, add another fan pushing cold air inside the case to improve even more the temperatures inside the case to it remains stable

not all gpus can overclock this well, so perhaps you are lucky, untillsomeone comes saying that reached 1550mhz, such is life :D
 
Solution

UniformGreen

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Feb 9, 2015
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I could reach 1526mhz without any problems but I went back to 1.5ghz. How do I check VRM temperature? I don't think this GPU has that much cooling power as the MSI Gaming edition. And I have 4 fans in my case (Zalman Z3 Plus).
 

UniformGreen

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I know what VRM's are. I just wanted to check where this GPU can break and I found out. I don't think I really need the 180MHz overclock for 3-4 fps more... Even more because I want to sell this card in the near future when Vega or even Volta is releasing.