Overclocking help. Too much core voltage?

[Carosel43]

Hi Guys

I am overclocking my GTX970 Gaming from MSI and am getting a touch concerned about my core voltage.

 

I cant get much out of it without upping the voltage but am now up to +50mv (1.25v total) with +155 on the core (boosting to 1522) and +310 on the memory. In unigine heaven the card maxes out at about 79'c in my rather hot room and the core clock runs at 1522 for a while then drops slightly to 1509. The only snag is I still get artifacts when running although the driver does not crash.

 

Any idea how far it is safe to push the voltage? I have heard it said that anything afterburner will allow is ok but wanted to double check.

 

Thanks

[Kryptyx]

You won't do any immediate damage if you are maxing out voltage on a stock bios. It may take a year off the life of the card but you'll likely replace it well before that becomes a problem.

[Dionyz]

11 minutes ago, Carosel43 said:

Hi Guys

I am overclocking my GTX970 Gaming from MSI and am getting a touch concerned about my core voltage.

 

I cant get much out of it without upping the voltage but am now up to +50mv (1.25v total) with +155 on the core (boosting to 1522) and +310 on the memory. In unigine heaven the card maxes out at about 79'c in my rather hot room and the core clock runs at 1522 for a while then drops slightly to 1509. The only snag is I still get artifacts when running although the driver does not crash.

 

Any idea how far it is safe to push the voltage? I have heard it said that anything afterburner will allow is ok but wanted to double check.

 

Thanks

That is correct, but you can overheat the card if you put too much voltage. Make sure you adjust the fan curve before overclocking.

[Carosel43]

Hi Guys

Thanks for the comments.

 

The card it on its standard MSI BIOS so nothing fancy there. Temps are below the 82'c 'normal' top limit for Nvidia cards so temps are ok.

 

I have been doing some more testing and it seems that the card is ignoring my voltage changes and only applies them when it feels like it. On average it sits at 1.225v and only rarely jumps up to the requested 1.25v. gpuz tells me I am bouncing around at 99-109% TDP so could it be killing the voltage due to power limit? I tried bringing the core speed down by a few MHz to see if it made any difference and it didn't so I tested it in a game and it runs very nicely without artifacts but both 3dmark 11 and unigine aren't happy. 3dmark in fact looks like a disco light show on the 2nd test for some reason.

 

Any ideas?