Guidance on overclocking 980

[Phinix]

Today I got myself a Gigabyte 980 G1 Gaming card.

I got this card for various reasons including the fact that it overclocks well.

 

I am using MSI afterburner and I ran the Unigine Valley benchmark to see how it runs out of the box.

It runs at 1392 Core and 3506 on memory at default settings.

 

I then increased the power limit and temp limit to its highest which is 122% power and 91°C.

I reran the benchmark and got the exact same core and memory speeds.

Afterburner also shows the card hits 1.218V when running the benchmark both times.

 

In my previous 670’s just by upping the power limit it would overclock itself even more.

 

So I want to know, what am I doing wrong?

And in terms of overclocking it what is the best way to do it? As I have never overclocked a gpu before.

 

Any advice is welcome.

[Ostwind]

Silly question but are you sure that you applied the settings after you upped the power limit and did you increase the voltage too?

[Mo5]

Sometimes setting it too high can cause a drop in performance. Try setting it back a bit

[Phinix]

Silly question but are you sure that you applied the settings after you upped the power limit and did you increase the voltage too?

 

Yup, it's applied.

I haven't touched the voltage as i don't know what is safe or how much to change it to. (As I don't want to kill my card on day one)

Currently "Core Voltage (mV)" is set to +0.

 

Sometimes setting it too high can cause a drop in performance. Try setting it back a bit

 

I ran the Valley benchmark before and after setting the power limit and there was literally a 0.1FPS average change.

[Ostwind]

Yup, it's applied.

I haven't touched the voltage as i don't know what is safe or how much to change it to. (As I don't want to kill my card on day one)

Currently "Core Voltage (mV)" is set to +0.

 

 

Nvidia is very strict when it comes to extra voltage so anything that you're able to apply is safe for the card. The reason the card didn't boost up more is because that clock is all it's able to do at that voltage. It needs more voltage to clock up by itself, something like this could be interpreted as a sign that your particular card isn't a good overclocker but it might just need som manual tweaking.  Increase the voltage to maximum and run the test again to see what it boosts to then see what you can add on top of that.

[Phinix]

Nvidia is very strict when it comes to extra voltage so anything that you're able to apply is safe for the card. The reason the card didn't boost up more is because that clock is all it's able to do at that voltage. It needs more voltage to clock up by itself, something like this could be interpreted as a sign that your particular card isn't a good overclocker but it might just need som manual tweaking.  Increase the voltage to maximum and run the test again to see what it boosts to then see what you can add on top of that.

 

Thanks for the info.

I set the slider to the max which is +87.

 

In the Valley benchmark it only increased the core from 1392 to 1418.

And the voltage from 1.218V to 1.262V.

 

So I assume i got essentially a "dud" in the overclocking world.

If I wanted to try manually overclock it is there a particular way i should go about it?

[Ostwind]

Thanks for the info.

I set the slider to the max which is +87.

 

In the Valley benchmark it only increased the core from 1392 to 1418.

And the voltage from 1.218V to 1.262V.

 

So I assume i got essentially a "dud" in the overclocking world.

If I wanted to try manually overclock it is there a particular way i should go about it?

 

I wouldn't call it a dud, it just might not have fared as well as it could have. The only real way to know that for sure though it to overclock it the rest of the way yourself.  The easiet way to do it is to just open something like unigen valley in windowed mode and start bumping the core clock by 20mhz increments until it becomes unstable.

[Phinix]

I wouldn't call it a dud, it just might not have fared as well as it could have. The only real way to know that for sure though it to overclock it the rest of the way yourself.  The easiet way to do it is to just open something like unigen valley in windowed mode and start bumping the core clock by 20mhz increments until it becomes unstable.

 

Do I do that while Valley is running?

Or up by 20mhz, apply, open Valley, run for a while, close, repeat.

 

And what would be identified as unstable?

Artifacts, bsod???

[Ostwind]

Do I do that while Valley is running?

Or up by 20mhz, apply, open Valley, run for a while, close, repeat.

 

And what would be identified as unstable?

Artifacts, bsod???

 

With valley open obviously, that's why you want to run it in windowed mode so you can see the effect immediately without having to restart the bench. It also keeps the card under load. With Nvidia you don't get BSOD's when overclocking, the screen will go black and you will get a popup that says the display driver stopped responding and then it will resume. After that happens you should exit the bench and reset the settings in afterburner as they will defult to the stock clocks after a crash. Once you reset them you can start from a point just before it crashed and continue on to find the top stable OC for your card.

[Phinix]

With valley open obviously, that's why you want to run it in windowed mode so you can see the effect immediately without having to restart the bench. It also keeps the card under load. With Nvidia you don't get BSOD's when overclocking, the screen will go black and you will get a popup that says the display driver stopped responding and then it will resume. After that happens you should exit the bench and reset the settings in afterburner as they will defult to the stock clocks after a crash. Once you reset them you can start from a point just before it crashed and continue on to find the top stable OC for your card.

 

Thanks you very much.

You've been very helpful.

I'll start now with the core and then will try with the memory.

[Phinix]

Last thing, do I want to have priority on Power Limit or Temp Limit?

[ExcitezR]

Last thing, do I want to have priority on Power Limit or Temp Limit?

for overclocking power limit 

[Phinix]

for overclocking power limit 

Thank you.

 

So using Valley and Heaven, I got it stable with no crashes or artifacting at +160 Core and +450 memory.

So finally I tested Firestrike and of course then things broke. After turning the memory back down to +0 and then realising the core was causing issues I moved it down to +150.

 

The core seems stable now at a boost of 1529Mhz. Tomorrow I will work on the memory again, hopefully aiming for around the +300 mark at least.

 

EDIT: Now have everything stable and working great at 1542 core, and 8002 on memory.