Pointers for OCing

[Brian Stirling]

I just built a new PC for image and video editing and I installed the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Hybrib Gaming GPU mostly because it comes with the partial water cooling. GPU is installed in a Asus x99-Pro/USB3.1 motherboard with i7-5820K CPU and Corsair H100i GTX CPU cooler with 32GB of G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM 3200 speed and a Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD for OS and programs all running under Windows 10 Home.

So I completed the build a few days ago and have been working with it and would like to do a moderate OC on it. I'm not hunting for bragging rights and would just like a moderate OC so that the system is a bit faster without pushing reliability of noise. I have yet to push the CPU OCing and at this point I'm maxing out at 4.0GHz but plan to go to about 4.2GHz -- well away from the top of the OCing capabilities.

So, are there any good sources for OCing the 980 Ti and particularly one like the EVGA water cooled board?


Brian

 

[Brian Stirling]

Well I didn't find anything that I could use and because I'm not looking to push things as far as possible the typical gamer tweaks are not really what I'm looking for. So, I wound up playing around on my own and have increased the performance only a bit. Increased the power target to 107% and the GPU clock offset to +124MHz with the mem clock offset by +133MHz.

So I'm probably only looking at a 7% net increase.

For my CPU I have upped the speed from 3.3GHz to 4.2GHz, but in truth the default settings with turbo boost is actually about 3.7GHz so only a net improvement of about 14% there.

I had problems when I tried to boost the RAM speed and had to do a BIOS CMOS reset when the PC locked up and wouldn't boot with a QLED code of 55 (no memory). Reset things and only after I had the CPU and GPU increased as above and stable did I go back to bump up the RAM. The RAM I purchased, 32GB (4x8GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 is rated at 3200 speed with 14-14-14-34 timings, but when I set the clock to 3200 it hung.

The default after reset was around 2400 which I've now bumped up to something over 2800. I can live with that and given my preference for cooler, quieter and more stable/reliable I think I'm about where I'll stay even though there is more there if I wished to push things. My basic thought was to increase the clock as much as reasonable without increasing the voltage as that combo will push the heat output up.

Under load the CPU goes to about 60C and the GPU, running Valley, goes to only about 50C -- both CPU and GPU are water cooled.


Brian

 

[hawtdawg]

Only mess with overclocking your system RAM once you feel like you've mastered CPU and GPU, it's far and away the most difficult to pin down. You should just be able to set the XMP profile and be done with it to get the rated speed. The XMP profile includes all of the timings, so don't try to set the speed manually, or you're probably going to have issues.

With your GPU, If you're not wanting to go crazy, I'd just push it until you're having stability problems on the stock voltage, and then back off a tad. Unigine Heaven is a good place to start as far as testing GPU stability (it's not all that reliably for the VRAM). With the hybrid card I'm pretty confident you can get 1500+mhz without touching the voltage. Go ahead and just max the power target to prevent any throttling.

For VRAM, you should be able to do at least +400 with no problems, and probably even +500, just don't rely on Unigine Heaven for VRAM stability, it will trick you into thinking you can go much higher than you can, just stick to gaming to test VRAM stability.