GTX 970 Performance Drop

[MrPixelMaster]

Recently I've had a great decrease of performance in-game from my GTX 970 SSC (ACX 2.0+ cooling).I recently tried to OC, I had aimed for about +200MHz on the GPU clock and the memory clock with a plus 8% power increase and an increase of the Voltage, +18mV. I'm wondering if my OCing damaged my GPU, seeing that i'm new to computer everything and make big mistakes. (Note: The GPU wasn't stable at that clock for me at least, the highest clock i've achieved with stability was GPU Clock- +140MHz, Memory +140MHz Power Target- +7% Voltage- +12mV and also my GPU has had the same performance in benchmarks, so i'm not sure what is going on. Thanks for whomever answers this and disregards my lack of knowledge towards computers).

[ApexTypeA]

There are going to be a lot of people more experienced than me responding to this but, in my opinion, it is unlikely you caused any permanent damage to the graphics card, with the numbers you showed here. Question is: what is causing you to think or experience a drop in performance? What are the signs that you see, if the benchmarks are coming up the same?

[MrPixelMaster]

3 minutes ago, ApexTypeA said:

There are going to be a lot of people more experienced than me responding to this but, in my opinion, it is unlikely you caused any permanent damage to the graphics card, with the numbers you showed here. Question is: what is causing you to think or experience a drop in performance? What are the signs that you see, if the benchmarks are coming up the same?

There has been a major drop in FPS and yep I can still hear my fans spinning at a decent speed. For example in Tropico 5, I used to get an average of about 150 fps with the game camera zoomed all the way out, and after OCing there are instances where my FPS drops to 30, even with the game camera fully zoomed in. (Thanks for the response by the way, its reassuring that my GPU isn't damaged) 

[Enderman]

no thats far from enough voltage to damage it

 

[ApexTypeA]

IMO, there could be a few reasons why this could be happening.

 

1 - First, are all the game graphical settings the same? Are you sure AA X8 or whatever isn't enabled by mistake? In other words; can you fiddle with the game settings to see if you can get similar results as before?

2 - Also, when you overclock I assume you are using either your graphics card or MSI Afterburner. Did you take a look at the charts? How is your GFX cards numbers? Clock speed, temps, all that. Is everything stable? 

3 - Drivers. Did you install new drivers recently? Any environmental aspect on the PC that could be causing this at all?  

 

[MrPixelMaster]

4 minutes ago, ApexTypeA said:

IMO, there could be a few reasons why this could be happening.

 

1 - First, are all the game graphical settings the same? Are you sure AA X8 or whatever isn't enabled by mistake? In other words; can you fiddle with the game settings to see if you can get similar results as before?

2 - Also, when you overclock I assume you are using either your graphics card or MSI Afterburner. Did you take a look at the charts? How is your GFX cards numbers? Clock speed, temps, all that. Is everything stable? 

3 - Drivers. Did you install new drivers recently? Any environmental aspect on the PC that could be causing this at all?  

 

All the graphical settings are the same as they've been with performance in the past, when I OC I monitor what is going on via EVGA PrecisionX16 and yes everything is stable (I test the OC on FurMark before gaming ect.) and I keep all my GPU drivers up to date and have automatic updates for my games. There are no environmental aspects causing this whatsoever in my opinion, the spikes of degraded performance happen when and when I don't use skype.  

[Big-G]

Did you run Skydiver benchmark to test stability? That benchmark will be closer to gaming on the OC as any other bench.

 

If that benchmark doesn't run stable, then your OC is far from stable.

 

I'd bet the OC is slightly too high and you are running into power or thermal throttling issues.