Overclocking the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X

Megazero · June 27, 2016

So after a few week bugging the locale shop here every single day asking if they have it in stock, I finally able to get my hand on 1 today and escape the life of only using iGPU... So as any "real gamer" out there, the first thing I do after taking a bunch of picture, boast about it on Facebook to my friends and installed it into my computer... is to spend 2+ hours trying to OC and benchmark this thing.

So first thing first, the Gaming app. It have 3 mode: Gaming Mode, OC mode and the no-one-use-it mode. By default it set to Gaming Mode, and with all the controversy abt the different review bios and stuff, I decided to turn on the OC Mode right away before doing anything. It promted me to restart the computer (BTW the Gaming App stay in Japanese language because I set locale of my desktop to Japan to play Visual novel... kinda annoying) so I restart it... and it crashed upon reboot. After a while I found out that since I use the MSI Z87 G45 Gaming Mobo, somehow the OC mode of the Gaming App also affect the Mobo's OC Genie, and the weirder things is that it automatically ram my CPU to 40x - 4GHz. My poor i7 4770k can do at best 3.8GHz as I have tried before, so ofc with that auto 4GHz it crashed. And I cant figure out how to tune it down to 3.8 without disable the OC mode in the gaming app all together, so I just stop using the Gaming App. Gaming App also let u customize the LED on the card, but given that the card is already Red Black theme there isnt much sense changing the color to anything else.

On to the manual OCing (I say manual but GPU Boost 3.0 kick in automatically anyway right?) After a while I figure out my card's limit is around 130Mhz Core Clock with 650 Memory Clock (to be fair I still new to OCing so I dont really understand why do we have to OC the memory and how do it affect things) without messing with the voltage and only set the Power Limit to 126% and Temp Limit to 92 Degree Celsius. And here's the result using Heaven benchmark (since it's free :D) In this benchmark however I only run at +120MHz Core Clock since this will probably be where I left it to play normally.

It's a bit strange that the Heaven Benchmark say that the core clock of the 1070 is 2100Mhz, but the MSI Afterburner said that the core clock is stable at 2063MHz (it start at 2075Mhz but dip to 2063 right away and stay there till the end). The card run super cool at top 60 degree Celsius and average at around 55 degree, in the room with around 27-28 degree temperature. I try to set custom fan curve but it seem a bit weird so I just left to auto, and at ~ 60 degree the fans run at around 70% (I do feel like my custom, more aggressive fan curve do affect it, but I'm not sure). It didnt really make any audible noise sitting in my case.

So overall... not a bad experience. I do quite enjoy my current OC and I think with some additional voltage change I can bump it in to the magical 2.1Ghz number, but I'd rather let it run stable at this clock and temp. Feel free to tell me if I did something wrong and if needed I will post additional benchmark after fixing what I did wrong

Imakuni · June 27, 2016

7 minutes ago, Megazero said:

t's a bit strange that the Heaven Benchmark say that the core clock of the 1070 is 2100Mhz, but the MSI Afterburner said that the core clock is stable at 2063MHz (it start at 2075Mhz but dip to 2063 right away and stay there till the end).

It doesn't surprise me that the numbers differ. Heaven / Valley's readings were never that great. Or even good for that matter...

Anyways, since you have a 1070, can you do me a favor then? I would love to know how it performs in a very specific app, as I plan on buying it myself. If you could help me test it real quick, I'd be very appreciated. It should only take a few minutes of your time, but as a bonus, you can actually just let it run for longer and test cooling if you want. Skip the rest of the message if you are not up to it.

Spoiler

First, download the app and a necessary cuda dll for it to run. Put them both into the same folder. If you know how to use cmd prompt (I'll explain in the spoiler below if you don't), the command line is "GFNSvCUDA-0_7-win32.exe 22 131000 131200 BX" without the quotes, where that X is a number between 7 and 13.

Start with X=7 and let it run for around 15 seconds. On the bottom line, at the very end, you should see a "xxx P/day" number: that's what I'm interested in. Take note of it. Repeat for X=8~13 and just post here whatever those numbers were, I'll know what they mean.

Oh, and if the screen lags horibly at the higher values, don't worry, it is normal.

Spoiler

How to use the command prompt (for the purpose of this test anyway):

In windows explorer, go to where you saved the files, click into the adress bar and copy that adress.
Press Windows+R, type "cmd" without the quotes and hit the Enter key.
In the new window that popped up, type "cd", hit the space key once and press Ctrl+V. Hit enter
Copy that command line I mentioned early, without the quotes. Remember to change X to the number for each test. Hit enter.
It'll show a bunch of stuff, don't worry. As I said, just look at the P/day number after around 20s and make note of it. Once you do, you can just press Ctrl+C to stop the test (yes, that shortcut is not for copying stuff in prompt).
Then, repeat step 4 until you have all the data needed.