GTX 1080 Overclock

[Hydra453]

Hello!

I currently have an i5 6400 and a Galax GTX 1080 Exoc Sniper White edition

I was wondering how high i can go on overclocking without screwing it up.

I am using air cooling not water cooling. I'm pretty new to overclocking so if you can give a detailed explanation i'd appreciate it. 

I also currently use MSI Afterburner (that;s what i have installed) but if you think i should use something else let me know.

 

Thanks!

[stealth80]

No one can say for sure as it depends on your chip luck and airflow/heat, around 2150 is approx the most you will get out of pascal 

[Hydra453]

Just now, stealth80 said:

No one can say for sure as it depends on your chip luck and airflow/heat, around 2150 is approx the most you will get out of pascal 

thank you

[W-L]

-Related Threads Merged- 

[RadiatingLight]

It's nearly impossible to screw it up without flashing a custom BIOS since NVidia locks it down pretty tight. so I'd personally turn up voltage and power limit all the way, then see how far you can go with core clock and memory clock. keeping an eye on temps obviously.

[A1Mike_W]

Depends on what kind of overclock you want - you can push the clocks to the limits at the risk of some instability in certain occasions or you can get more out of what you have and stay well within safe ranges. The performance difference between the two is rarely more than 5fps average so unless you NEED those frames you're good.

Different hardware overclocks differently so there's a lot of experimenting involved.

As you're new to this, I'll explain the safest route to alleviate some of the anxiety (which I know I felt when I first started). Just keep in mind that the safest method takes a pretty long time.

Download the following:

MSI Afterburner (for the overclock itself)

OCCT (stability checking - picks up on errors produced by the GPU long before they result in visible glitches or instability)

A stress test program - something like Heaven or Valley benchmark (to stress the GPU in a more realistic scenario)

 

The method:

1. Open up your stress test program in windowed mode at the highest settings and have it running in the background to make sure GPU utilisation is at 99-100%
2. Open up MSI afterburner and move the power limit all the way to the right as well as the temperature limit to something like 85, then wait for the GPU to reach equilibrium temperature (when it stops climbing)
3. Open up OCCT and navigate over to the GPU tab, change shader complexity to 3, enable error check mode, and make sure it's in windowed mode. Click the ON button and confirm that you're currently at 0 errors (should be green).
4. On MSI Afterburner, bring core clock up to a modest +100 as almost all cards should be able to handle this. Wait 30 seconds and bring it up by another +10. The timing isn't specific, just give it some time to settle into the new speed and keep an eye on error count. If the application hangs, you see artefacts or glitches, you've gone too far. If errors start showing, don't panic as this doesn't do any damage, just bring the overclock down until they stop generating.
5. Find an overclock at which the errors don't show up anymore and bring it down by another 10MHz on top of that for safe measure.
6. Let your GPU stress test for a few hours. I had clocks that seemed stable while I was messing with them, but when I left them for 8 hours overnight they generated thousands of errors. Bring clocks down until this doesn't happen.
7. Once you're happy with the core clock, move onto the memory clock. A modest +200 should be completely safe to begin with, and you can bring it up by +20MHz every time. Expect to go up to possibly +400-700 without errors showing on OCCT, sticking to the rules above.
8. Memory clock is different in the sense that going too high can actually impact performance. Use the stress test program to make the camera stop moving in a place that's the most demanding on your GPU (to keep the load stable), and keep an eye on the FPS. You can sometimes bring down the memory overclock from the highest possible without errors to a lower speed that will actually result in a higher FPS.
9. Do a final stress test for about 12ish hours. If no errors show up, you've done everything correctly. If you still get some, try bringing down the overclock a bit. 

 

That's about everything. Overclocking within the error limits of OCCT helps ensure that the overclock is stable across most games, but you can always run OCCT in the background while running a game you're having problems with to see if it's the overclock that's causing problems. If you're confused about any part or want to know how/why something works, feel free to ask as my explanation is sorta all over the place. Good luck!

[zDeathMagneticz]

Honestly I would very much think the CPU is the bottleneck here, dont know that overclocking your GPU would do much good