G1 Gaming 980 Ti TDP

[roylapoutre]

Hello fellas!

 

I bought a GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming from Gigabyte at the end of 2015, and I was extremely disappointed by the little 1440MHz OC I could get with my chip, espacially with 76% ASIC quality. Moreover while seeing people easily achieving 1500MHz with this GPU.

 

I was really busy at the time and I didn't really investigate further. But recently I discovered with GPUZ that, even with 130% power limit set on OC GURU or Precision X, the card NEVER hits more than 95% TDP even with +87mV on the voltage which seems extremely strange. I turned down all power saving settings on Windows and the Nvidia control panel, I also upgraded my PSU, MB and CPU recently, and the results are the same than with my older rig. The drivers are crashing instantaneously when going above 1450ish with +87mV and 130% power limit, but the card never seems to draw the required power since it's sitting at 90-95% TDP on load during heavy benchmarks or gaming...

 

I didn't find similar cases while looking around on the internet, so I came here to see if you folks have some ideas on this matter !

 

Thanks in advance  

[roylapoutre]

Little bump to see if I get lucky!

[LooneyJuice]

Luck of the draw, as per usual. ASIC score doesn't always relate to max OC potential. It does occasionally when constrained to the stock TDP and voltage limits, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll hit a peak sooner or later. Lower ASIC scoring chips for example may respond to voltage better, prompting people to flash a custom bios for more voltage, which may eventually net them a pretty hefty boost. Especially under water or LN2. Your ASIC score merely means it is a more efficient chip than a lesser scoring one. Additionally, no power saving options, k-boost(constant voltage) or other trickery will help your cause if you just reached your chip's peak. Not to mention it's not horrible, especially since I've heard of worst cases, and the best cases I've seen usually hover around 1525-1530mhz core. So TL;DR, luck of the draw, it happens, ASIC doesn't always correlate to max overclock.

[roylapoutre]

I am aware of the silicon lottery, but that's not really the point here. I can't figure out how my chip fails horribly past a certain point despite the fact that it doesn't even reach 100% TDP on power consumption. It feels like the chip doesn't receive enough juice to maintain a stable higher voltage, thus creating this abrupt instabilities. I've had some GPU where increasing voltage didn't do anything regarding stability, but pushing the voltage always increases the power consumption, at least to 100% TDP. I really fail to understand how I am supposed to test the overclocking on my GPU if the power target doesn't even hit 100% TDP, especially when adding voltage and asking for 130% TDP.

[Spectrez]

idd suggest instead of tossing numbers out, showing some afterburner graphs, not much to go on here 

[roylapoutre]

This is a screenshot of GPU-Z during a Unigine Valley benchmark, the numbers are similar during Firestrike Extreme. It begins to crash after 1430MHz most of the time, and the power consumption never goes above 95% TDP even in extreme load with maxed out voltage through Precision X, OC Guru or Afterburner. As shown in the screenshot, there can't be any throttling with those temps