"Safe" GPU Core voltage

[Tyrius]

Hey guys,

this is an follow up to my questions about how to overclock my gtx 770.

 

Now I have another question regarding voltages.

In several forums and news articles (like this one http://www.anandtech.com/show/7392/the-geforce-gtx-770-roundup-evga-gigabyte-and-msi-compared/3) there is the mention of a voltage cap of 1.212V nVidia enforces on the 770, including the MSI Lightning edition (which I have).

 

In the anandtech article it explicitly mentions the cap for the card I have and that to use the full capability of the Lighning edition you would have to mod the bios.

Now I am not attempting to do that, but then I noticed something strange:

 

When I change the voltage control setting in Afterburner from default "MSI-Standart" to "MSI-Enhanced" the control is no longer limited to the max +12 mV, I can now set anything from -100 to +100.

At first I thought that would mean nothing, maybe Afterburner would let me set it, but the bios would still prevent the card from going over 1.212V, but a quick test with +20mV showed that the core voltage would indeed go to 1.220V.

 

This is really surprising to me, as online I read everywhere that the default bios was limited to 1.212. I have not flashed anything, I have not even switched to the LN2 bios.

 

Now here comes the question: How far should I go at max? When researching on my 6600K I read that the general opinion is not to go over ~1.325-1.375 V for a 24/7 OC, is there something similar for GPUs/the gtx 770? 

[App4that]

Safe? No such thing. But most of us max out Afterburner and don't have issues.

[Tyrius]

Safe? No such thing. But most of us max out Afterburner and don't have issues.

Well maxing out default is +12mV which isn't a lot for my card I think.

But I see that my wording and lack of overclocking experience may lead to strange questions ^^

 

I'll just tweak a little more, and try not to kill my card with too much voltage, the main reason I posted this is because I was surprised about the max voltage that should be in place but doesn't seem to be on my card.

 

The reason most people say Afterburner is safe to just play around with without damaging your stuff is that there are failsafe caps you can't go over without BIOS modding (because when you do that you obviously didn't want anything different from what your getting), which doesn't seem so be the case here, or is +100mV something you see regularly? (again limited experience with what kind of numbers are "normal/expected")

[App4that]

I never go a few m volts over on anything. Everything has a wall where the added voltage isn't worth the performance gains, and I find that an easy rule.