Afterburner GPU Overclock "Not Taking"

Avionix12 · January 15, 2016

Alright, so I built my first computer this week, and everything appears to be going well as best I can tell. I've decided to try to overclock my MSI 980 Ti Lightning LE to the non-Lite Edition speeds using MSI Afterburner. There's a problem, though. According to GPU-Z and my virtually unchanged benchmarks with Unigine Valley, any modifications I've made to clock speeds with Afterburner have not modified the maximum clock speed of the actual GPU. Although the GPU Clock bar visible in GPU-Z shows the supposedly enhanced clock speed, checking the sensors during active testing has revealed no change from the default clock settings (Never above 1025 MHz, or something close to that). I frankly don't know why this might be, and I haven't really found anything useful on it yet. Thanks in advance. System is below.

Using Windows 10, MSI Afterburner, GPU-Z, Unigine Valley Benchmark.

--MSI z97 Gaming 7 Motherboard

--Intel i7 4790K CPU

--Seasonic X750 PSU

--MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning, Lite Edition

--HyperX Fury, 16GB 1866MHz RAM

--Corsair H110i GT CPU Cooler

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Hmm, I've got a lead. It's never gone above 31.4% in power consumption under load, according to GPU-Z. Not sure what's causing this, as both 8 pins and the 6 pin cable have been hooked up to the PSU with three separate cables. They are all next to each other on the PSU though, on the same side as almost all of the cables. Perhaps there's a rail not being utilized, or something along that line? I don't really know.

Windows has Performance Mode set in the power settings.

Avionix12 · January 18, 2016

Alright, so I found the problem and fixed it. For anyone experiencing similar issues, here's what happened:

The very first things I found on similar problems were about the CPU bottlenecking the card. I dismissed this; an i7 4790K should have no issues running with a GTX 980 Ti. Well, long story short, it turns out that bottlenecking was the problem. After eventually thinking to check the CPU, I discovered something strange. It was only running at about 800 MHz, at 8X clock multiplier. What's special about that, you might ask? It's the minimum clock multiplier this processor can run at, meaning that something had specifically locked it there.

The answer turned out to be on the motherboard. Right above the SATA connectors on the MSI Gaming 7, there is a switch labeled "Slow 1". No points for guessing what that does... It drops the CPU multiplier to the minimum, overriding BIOS settings in case of something like a highly unstable overclock. For some reason, it was active on my board. So I turned the PC off, opened the case up, flipped the switch back to Normal and boom-- Problem solved. Without an artificially underpowered CPU, the 980 Ti was free to run rampant and destroy the benchmarks I had previously tested.

Kind of sad, because I've devoted at least 12 hours to finding this problem and fixing it, while the answer was right there the whole time. But I don't really regret it, and I learned a lot about the computer and the software during the process of figuring this out. So, time well spent in my opinion.