Overclocking 1660ti first timer

[farmerginge]

Hey guys,

 

So I just built my new rig and I'm pretty happy with it, I'm just trying to learn about overclocking my GPU for the first time. These are my current settings and my Time Spy score with the OC, everything is stable but I wanted to get your advice on if I'm doing anything unnecessary or missing out on some performance with these settings. 

 

I'm running the MSI GTX 1600Ti Armor

 

https://gyazo.com/2e830fc68c3303437fa0a90342bda65d

https://gyazo.com/f939a0556064434bb516931e9e4d9be2

https://gyazo.com/3eb1d3d62b012f7fb7ed6e6e9dae86fd

 

Cheers.

[boggy77]

7 minutes ago, farmerginge said:

Hey guys,

 

So I just built my new rig and I'm pretty happy with it, I'm just trying to learn about overclocking my GPU for the first time. These are my current settings and my Time Spy score with the OC, everything is stable but I wanted to get your advice on if I'm doing anything unnecessary or missing out on some performance with these settings. 

 

I'm running the MSI GTX 1600Ti Armor

 

https://gyazo.com/2e830fc68c3303437fa0a90342bda65d

https://gyazo.com/f939a0556064434bb516931e9e4d9be2

https://gyazo.com/3eb1d3d62b012f7fb7ed6e6e9dae86fd

 

Cheers.

msi afterburner now has an auto-overclock function. push the voltage, power and temp limits to the maximum, click apply, then click on the small button to the left of the core clock slider and it will take you to a menu where you can click auto-overclock. it will take 10 minutes or so and find the best voltage/frequency curve for your card. don't forget afterwards to apply and save.

[AkSo2504]

23 minutes ago, farmerginge said:

Hey guys,

 

So I just built my new rig and I'm pretty happy with it, I'm just trying to learn about overclocking my GPU for the first time. These are my current settings and my Time Spy score with the OC, everything is stable but I wanted to get your advice on if I'm doing anything unnecessary or missing out on some performance with these settings. 

 

I'm running the MSI GTX 1600Ti Armor

 

https://gyazo.com/2e830fc68c3303437fa0a90342bda65d

https://gyazo.com/f939a0556064434bb516931e9e4d9be2

https://gyazo.com/3eb1d3d62b012f7fb7ed6e6e9dae86fd

 

Cheers.

Set voltage, power to max and can adjust the max temp a bit too, fire up heaven benchmark in window mode.

As it is running go with +15 on your gpu clock and see if it still runs fine without any glitches, then go +30 and so on until you see glitches or it crashes and go one step back.

With Memory speed you can do the same thing, but can do 50mhz difference. Tell us your results.

[farmerginge]

1 hour ago, boggy77 said:

msi afterburner now has an auto-overclock function. push the voltage, power and temp limits to the maximum, click apply, then click on the small button to the left of the core clock slider and it will take you to a menu where you can click auto-overclock. it will take 10 minutes or so and find the best voltage/frequency curve for your card. don't forget afterwards to apply and save.

Surely if I set everything to max and apply it will just crash right?

[farmerginge]

54 minutes ago, AkSo2504 said:

Set voltage, power to max and can adjust the max temp a bit too, fire up heaven benchmark in window mode.

As it is running go with +15 on your gpu clock and see if it still runs fine without any glitches, then go +30 and so on until you see glitches or it crashes and go one step back.

With Memory speed you can do the same thing, but can do 50mhz difference. Tell us your results.

The voltage slider is a % plus though, surely I don't want to be adding 100% voltage to the gpu? 

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, farmerginge said:

Surely if I set everything to max and apply it will just crash right?

No, the clocks are what will crash it. I wouldn't max the voltage slider, that really does aboooout nothing. 

2 minutes ago, farmerginge said:

The voltage slider is a % plus though, surely I don't want to be adding 100% voltage to the gpu? 

You cannot put dangerous voltages through a Pascal or Turing card without hardware or BIOS mods, Nvidia plain will not allow it at a firmware/hardware level. Maxing it cannot harm the card. 

 

I run an EVGA XC Ultra 1660 Ti, when OCing I loop Unigine Valley at 900-1080p in the background, to make sure the card is under load (make sure to uncheck the fullscreen option so you can still use your OC software). 

 

For OC software I recommend MSI Afterburner, it's the best in the biz. Install it, boot it up, open the settings. On the General tab, enable start with Windows if you want it to always be open whenever your PC is on, and then go down to the Compatability Properties settings. Check the boxes for "unlock voltage control" and "unlock voltage monitoring" (leave this at "standard MSI, no need to change it). Then in the Fan tab I'd reccomend making a little more aggro of a fan profile, 1660 Tis aren't hard to cool so try and keep it below 60C (mine will stay in the 40s-low 50s with max fanspeed and it's not that loud). If you wanna hop over to Monitoring, you can muck around with what you want to show up in the OSD. I usually choose GPU clocks, memory clocks, vram usage, temps, voltage, fps, frametimes, and then some CPU and other general stats. Once you've got all the stuff you want in there, hit OK. It'll ask you to restart the software, then it should be good to go. 

Once you've got Afterburner up and running, fire up Unigine Valley and pull up the main Afterburner window. Slap the power limit and temp limit to max, no need to really touch the voltage slider (you can try it but it usually does nothing). Then start putting in clocks at 10-15Mhz increments then waiting a minute or two, as soon as you see artifacting or get a driver crash you drop it back to the last setting. I'd try a +75 on the core to start, chances are you'll get to 100-140 depending on how good your card is. Once you find a stable setting on the core and you let Valley run for 5-10 minutes without a crash (meaning it's probably stable, or very close to 100% stable), then you start tinkering with the memory. This usually has way more headroom, +800 or even +1000 is often a good starting place. Then you do the same as the core, though with VRAM crashes usually happen much faster so it's a little easier. 

[farmerginge]

Thanks everyone, 

 

I decided to try and do it manually in afterburner and I managed to get the following benchmark in Heaven using these settings: https://gyazo.com/a3238ba32a5ae98198ebaf31eb1afd60

[Zando_]

Just now, farmerginge said:

Thanks everyone, 

 

I decided to try and do it manually in afterburner and I managed to get the following benchmark in Heaven using these settings: https://gyazo.com/a3238ba32a5ae98198ebaf31eb1afd60

ooooooooooo NICE! Is it stable for a 30 minute or so run? They can still crash in some games though, but usually if they pass that they're stable. 160 on the core is noice, best mine has done so far is about 120 or so IIRC, for a ~2012Mhz max boost. 

[farmerginge]

Just now, Zando Bob said:

ooooooooooo NICE! Is it stable for a 30 minute or so run? They can still crash in some games though, but usually if they pass that they're stable. 160 on the core is noice, best mine has done so far is about 120 or so IIRC, for a ~2012Mhz max boost. 

It actually just crashed as you said that haha. Gonna stick it down to 150 and see if it's stable now for longer.

 

[Zando_]

Just now, farmerginge said:

It actually just crashed as you said that haha. Gonna stick it down to 150 and see if it's stable now for longer.

Ah yes the trials of GPU overclocking. I have a pair of GTX 780s I muck around with (on those you can actually change the voltage and such quite a bit), they passed a few runs of big old 3DMark FireStrike and FireStrike Extreme at 1333Mhz on the core, and now they just decided they won't do that anymore, lol. GPUs are deceptive little buggers, but you should be able to get a core clock over 2000Mhz stable pretty easily.