GTX 970, How much memory OC is too much?

[LooneyJuice]

Hello ladies and gents,

 

First proper post here, because as the title states, there is something bugging me. A few months ago I finally pulled the trigger on a G1 Gaming 970 (Yes, even with the advent of pascal around the corner, seeing as even a 1070 would be like sticking a Titan in a turd in my case, not to mention the possible lack of funds around the time of that release). Now, the problem is that I've either run into an extremely good sample, or I'm just mindlessly thrashing the poor thing. So, to preface, some specs.

 

Stock posted boost clock: 1329mhz (actual 1392, not bad, not too special though)

Max stable core oc: 1520mhz (on stock voltage, again, not bad, but not earth-shattering)

 

But here's the interesting bit.

 

Stock memory clock: 7010mhz

Max stable (and non-artifacting) memory clock: 8470mhz(!)

 

And yes, that means a +730mhz (1460mhz effective) offset on AB.

Fun fact, this is on Elpida memory which people find amusing, even though It's luck of the draw.

 

Scouring other websites and forums, I've struggled to find many 970s that even come near to that sort of stable memory clock. And trust me, this was a very methodical search for the limit.

It included going up in increments of 25mhz after an initial 150mhz bump, running at least 1 if not 2 heaven/valley runs at 1440p using DSR + 8xAA, followed by a similarly overtaxed run on Metro Last Light Redux benchmark, some GTAV and finally The Witcher 3 and The Division.

 

So, my question is this. Even knowing how safe OCing is these days (not to mention I haven't even touched voltage), even knowing that the G1 has excellent cooling (and VRM cooling), and even going by the tried and true method of backing down until the crashing and artifacting is completely eliminated regardless of scenario, is there any reason to hold off? Is there any sort of damage that can befall memory which I'm not aware of? I'm really asking for piece of mind since this is my only piece of GPU hardware for a while, and I just wanted to extract an extra bit more due to the silly thermal headroom.

 

My thanks in advance for going through this rather long-winded post.

[Imakuni]

There really isn't much problem. So long as you don't do anything that actually stresses your card (otherwise your OC is going to fall flat, I assure you), you don't really need to worry about it.

[LooneyJuice]

Thanks for the reply. I drew the same conclusion at first, but I arrived at this question because I just couldn't make sense of that silly offset. I mean, it's translated to an overall bump in performance in the order of ~13%. And it is actually really noticeable in a real world scenario.