Overclocking Gtx 970...what's the limit?

[Dr Seuss]

Okay first of all, this is my first time overclocking my gpu, I've never tried anything as daring as this and quite frankly I'm a little nervous. But everyone claims it's safe so I went and downloaded MSI afterburner. First thing I notice is a temp limit. Okay, so if I get to whatever temp I set it'll stop overclocking. Even more safe. I fiddle with the controls a bit, turn my fan curve up, and up the power to 105%, up the base clock +200, then run 3dmark on steam. Yay, I got 20 points higher.

 

Well, that much isn't gonna really get me anywhere in games, so I tried going higher, and it wouldn't work. 3dmark kept crashing, and when it finally did work, I got a worse score than without afterburner.

 

Why? Is there a limit to how much I can overclock? I was watching the gpu temps the whole time, they never went above 70 degrees celcius. Am I using afterburner wrong? 

[boggy77]

upping the base clock by 200 and the power to only 105 makes the card power-throttling. up the power limit to the max and re-do the 3dmark with +200 and see the difference.

[Alex Atkin UK]

You're probably hitting the power limit.  As I recall to get a decent improvement out of mine I had to use the NVIDIA BIOS hacking tool to increase the power limit to 125%, which is risky.

[Dr Seuss]

11 minutes ago, boggy77 said:

upping the base clock by 200 and the power to only 105 makes the card power-throttling. up the power limit to the max and re-do the 3dmark with +200 and see the difference.

Why is there such a small power slider and such a large base clock slider then?

[boggy77]

2 minutes ago, Dr Seuss said:

Why is there such a small power slider and such a large base clock slider then?

that's just how they made their software, to work with all gpus. power is in % so it's always going to be the same for all gpus. core frequency can vary. you can overclock some gpus by 100, some by 400.

[Dr Seuss]

Okay I'll try that...

Question though, when I jacked the base clock up more before and tried running 3dmark, i got a red screen for around 5 seconds(this was after it crashed twice) why did that happen?

[Whiro]

1 hour ago, Dr Seuss said:

jacked the base clock up more

By how much? Maybe you push it too much than. 

[xg32]

iirc is very rare for the core clock to hit 1600mhz boost, so go for around 1550-1575 first.