Overclocking my EVGA GTX 960 2 GB SSC

[Darkroe]

Hello all!

I am delving into the realm of overclocking on my 3 year old system. I am not trying to go crazy, just see how far I can push the hardware. I already managed to overclock my CPU to 4.35 GHz (stable) as a start, and I wanted to try the same for my GPU. I have EVGA PrecisionX and was wondering if anyone has suggestions for overclock settings. I have tried raising everything a little bit, but have found it to be unstable even with the slightest adjustment. Obviously since I am new, I have little knowledge in this area and would appreciate any additional knowledge anyone wishes to offer! Meantime, google and I are going to be researching this stuff.

 

Thanks in advance for reading or commenting!

 

-Darkroe

[aisle9]

Before you get started, a word of warning: I've owned three 960s, two 2GB models and one 4GB. They're all dogs when it comes to overclocking. The best I've had was getting the 4GB model to +47MHz on the core and +100-ish on the memory before my all-time favorite Overwatch match, where my screen went mostly black aside from red outlines of people shooting at me--and I still got play of the game on a Junkrat tire. Adjusting voltage did nothing for me on any of those cards.

 

The general idea behind overclocking is to take the core speed up as high as you can get it before it becomes unstable, then bump up the voltage and try moving it up again. As long as your thermals are in check and you're ok with the amount of noise coming off of the card, you can take the voltage all the way to the max the program allows. NVIDIA's vBIOS isn't going to let you take voltage dangerously high. Once you've maxed out what the core can do, you start tweaking memory speed. I've seen a lot of claims that on Maxwell cards, like the 960, memory speed isn't as important as core, but I beg to differ. I got better results out of a high memory overclock and no core than I did the other way around--not that either was sustainable for long. Also, take your card's power limit as high as you can so it pumps more energy in and keeps it at a higher speed.

 

Run about 5 minutes of Kombustor after you have your card's overclock settings where you'd like to test them. This will give you a quick hit of intense workload to see if you're getting artifacts or crashing, and will let you see how your temperatures are under full load. Don't run Kombustor or Furmark for extended periods of time, as those are not designed to be long-term test programs and you can damage your card at the temperatures they create. Once you've wrapped up your 5 minutes with safe thermals and no errors, open up Unigine Heaven or Unigine Valley, set it to the detail and resolution you intend to game on, and let it run for however long you want (the longer the better). This is a good real-world simulation for what your 960 will have to do when gaming, and if you get errors, artifacts or a crash, you know that you need to dial back the overclock. Take your memory down a step first, then your core, then repeat until you're stable over a long-term Heaven run. Once you're stable over a long-term Heaven run, my suggestion would be to start dialing your voltage back using the same method: take it back a notch, Kombustor, Heaven, stability check, if stable dial back another notch. In the case of my 4GB 960, it didn't need any additional voltage to hit that +47MHz result, but dumping extra voltage in did nothing to improve its results or stability.

 

Once you've got everything where you want it, Firestrike makes a great final test. Let it run a few times, then let it sit, then run it a couple more times, and follow that general pattern for a few hours. If it holds up to five minutes of Kombuster, eight hours of Heaven and 3-4 hours of cycling Firestrike like that, you're probably as close to stable as you'll get.

 

Until you play Overwatch, the screen goes black and you just start randomly firing grenades off in every direction because you can't see.