Decreased performance after overclock

Liability · April 10, 2016

Alright, so I just got a 970 ssc and went to do a "mild" overclock on it (my friend advised it). I only did about 50 mhz and did a benchmark. I noticed that the card was running near 3500 mhz and thought it was impossible for that to happen so I went back to afterburner and it said that it was +1000. I quickly changed it back to 0 and now I'm noticing that in my games I'm getting no where near the fps that I was getting before. My friend has the same build and was getting an fps of about 100+ on ultra for the Valley benchmark where I would be getting around 50.

What have I done and what can I do to fix it? I've already reset my pc to see if it was software but I'm starting to think that afterburner messed something up...any help would be appreciated.

Energycore · April 10, 2016

If you haven't, do a clean install of the latest Nvidia drivers.

Your GPU's core most probably never clocked itself that high. It would have crashed immediately forcing you to restart. That 3500MHz might have been your memory clock (970s clock their memories at 3500 most of the time). Try doing your overclock on another program like EVGA's precision X to see if the problem persists.

One of the most common reasons for decreased performance is programs running on the background. Check for some program clogging up CPU resources. If it's your antivirus that's using a lot of the CPU, make sure you're not connected to the internet if you're gonna disable its protection features.