Tips for overclocking my 980 Ti?

[Stg-Flame]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487139

This is my current card and I was wondering what I should be able to achieve without liquid cooling. Considering it's been almost five years since I overclocked anything, I really don't want to stress the card too much and burn it out before I've had a chance to even see its full potential.

Currently I'm using eVGA Precision X but several people recommended I use Afterburner instead but I'm mainly worried I'm going to damage the card. I remember it's a lot of bumping them up slowly, then doing a bit of stability testing, then trying to go a bit higher after each test, but I recall my buddy overclocking his old GTX 780 to the point where it burned it out (or just damaged it somehow - I don't know the technical aspects too well).

Anyways, any tips for this card would be greatly appreciated. I should note, I have extremely good ventilation and air-cooling for this card, so I'm not too worried about the temps getting too high.

 

[tviceman]

You should hit at least 1400mhz in games, and your vram should hit ~7800mhz or higher (vram shows as half speed in afterburner so 7800mhz would read as 3900mhz, a +400mhz offset). Don't worry about adjusting the voltage; with air cooling it's often more detrimental to overclocking Nvidia Maxwell cards than helpful. Unfortunately, in order to hit those speeds your fan will ramp up significantly and may be noisy. With whatever overclocking utility you use, change the temperature target to 90 degrees so your card will throttle less, but for longevity I'd say you want the card to not go past 86-87 degrees.

 

[Stg-Flame]

It seems my card won't go past 1240mhz on a full load. Any time I increase the offset past this point, it crashes the display driver.

 

[tviceman]

Increase the power target to the maximum allowable setting in the overclocking utility.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I'll give that a shot when I get home.

 

[Termie]

You should hit at least 1400mhz in games, and your vram should hit ~7800mhz or higher (vram shows as half speed in afterburner so 7800mhz would read as 3900mhz, a +400mhz offset). Don't worry about adjusting the voltage; with air cooling it's often more detrimental to overclocking Nvidia Maxwell cards than helpful. Unfortunately, in order to hit those speeds your fan will ramp up significantly and may be noisy. With whatever overclocking utility you use, change the temperature target to 90 degrees so your card will throttle less, but for longevity I'd say you want the card to not go past 86-87 degrees.

It seems my card won't go past 1240mhz on a full load. Any time I increase the offset past this point, it crashes the display driver.

Hold on a second guys. tviceman was right, but he didn't exactly explain his numbers fully.

You can't set the base clock to 1400MHz, that will never work on any card. He's talking about in-game boost clocks, which are almost universally 200MHz higher than base on every 980 Ti when not throttling. So set your base clock to 1202MHz (stock is 1102MHz on your SC model). You do this by giving it a +100 offset.

And yes, 7800MHz (+400MHz) on the memory is probably a good goal.

Adding voltage may add 20-30Mhz to the core clock, but it has to be done right. Just going to max is almost always going to be wrong with this GPU, because it uses too much power and starts throttling. Given that you're new to Maxwell, I'd just leave the voltage at stock.

And by the way, adjusting the power limit will in no way prevent crashes.

 

[moonbogg]

With my stock blowers, I remember getting around 1360 or so and that was on the verge of throttling due to temp. It was right at the limit with stock temp settings in precision. I wouldn't honestly expect to get around 1400 without really having the fan cranked up. That's fine and all, but just wanted to let you know.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Hold on a second guys. tviceman was right, but he didn't exactly explain his numbers fully.

You can't set the base clock to 1400MHz, that will never work on any card. He's talking about in-game boost clocks, which are almost universally 200MHz higher than base on every 980 Ti when not throttling. So set your base clock to 1202MHz (stock is 1102MHz on your SC model). You do this by giving it a +100 offset.

And yes, 7800MHz (+400MHz) on the memory is probably a good goal.

Adding voltage may add 20-30Mhz to the core clock, but it has to be done right. Just going to max is almost always going to be wrong with this GPU, because it uses too much power and starts throttling. Given that you're new to Maxwell, I'd just leave the voltage at stock.

And by the way, adjusting the power limit will in no way prevent crashes.

Thank you so much for giving this detailed of a description. As I said before, it's been almost five years since I last overclocked anything and I was worried I was going to damage the card by trying to go too high.

So, I set the offset for +100 on the clock and +400 for the memory then stress tested it for half an hour. My temps never exceeded 85c but my boost clock (according to Precision) never exceeded 1200MHz. I assume the 1400MHz boost clock I hear everyone talking about is something different because even on two different games, neither my core or boost clock came anywhere near 1400MHz (Metro Last Light maxed without SSAO and Witcher 2 completely maxed).

 

[RaistlinZ]

That's strange your boost never went past 1200. Sounds like down throttling. Set your Power limit % to 109% and your Temp limit to 91C.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I'll give that a try.

Edit: It seems jumping the Power Target to 110% which put the Temp at 91c boosted me to around 1340MHz during a normal stress test, but I'm not seeing 1400MHz and I can't increase the Power Target any more (which I honestly don't know what the Power Target even does but I assume it's pushing the card to 110%).

 

[Termie]

I'll give that a try.

Edit: It seems jumping the Power Target to 110% which put the Temp at 91c boosted me to around 1340MHz during a normal stress test, but I'm not seeing 1400MHz and I can't increase the Power Target any more (which I honestly don't know what the Power Target even does but I assume it's pushing the card to 110%).

The truth is that every card starts at a slightly different base clock, so overclocking can be Maxwell can be difficult. 1340MHz is a solid overclock, so clearly the offset is taking effect.

My guess is that you have 50-100MHz more offset that you can use before the card crashes. If you'd like to aim for 1400MHz, give it a +150MHz offset and monitor clocks in a game. A stress test, like Kombustor, is a bad way to find boost clocks - it will almost always throttle in that test. You can also use 3DMark to provide a typical gaming load without actually needing to play a game.

It might actually help if you told us the clocks that your card hits in a game with no manual overclocking. This will set the baseline and in turn will help guide the offset.

One of my 980 Ti cards boosts to 1202 in game, the other to 1154 or so, and both are reference-clocked cards. In other words, no two cards are identical, so you have to compensate for how your particular cards behaves. Ironically, the card with the lower stock boost can hit a 50MHz higher in-game boost with overclocking. 1446MHz vs. about 1400MHz before adding voltage.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I worked my card to 148 offset which seemed stable enough using Precision's stress test (which I honestly don't know if that was a true representation as you said), but the moment I loaded Metro Last Light, it crashed. Brought it down to 145 and it was stable while playing.

I can default the card and get some numbers if you like then bring them back up.

 

[Termie]

Sounds like you found your maximum. +145, added to the 100MHz factory overclock. That's 20% over reference, which is quite good.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Thanks for taking the time to bear with my ignorance on the matter.