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780 Classified overclocking.

Globber

Distinguished
Jan 30, 2014
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Hello Tom's Hardware. I am currently working on overclocking my 780 Classified and am having hang ups at about 1200 Mhz. I know my card should be capable of much more and I was hoping somebody would have some current info for these cards. I have been using precision X which sounds like from my research could be my problem. I am on my LN2 BIOS and running at 1202 Mhz boosted. If I try to push further (regardless of raising voltage) I end up with crashes. I am noticing in my GPUz monitors that my voltage will drop to zero out of nowhere and BAM - black screen and auto reset to default. My temps seem fine, I have never seen my temp go over 80 C and that was when I was benchmarking around 1350 Mhz, which never came close to stable in games. Using Heaven and Valley to benchmark. At 1254 Mhz my temp was never going over 73C and I had my voltage up to 1.212 but during games I would still get the random voltage drop to zero which would black screen me again. Could it be possible that my PSU is giving me the voltage drop randomly? I am pretty new to GPU OC but I did a lot of research for a few weeks before attempting overclocks. Any advice would be great!
 
Solution
you should use msi afterburner. load msi ab up, put in whatever overclock your running, and load up your game. let it crash, or whatever. look at msi ab's hardware monitor and what it reports the power target is. if its maxing out your power target, which would be 115% if your on the ln2 bios, then that is your problem. you can look at the other things like the core clock, which should show a steady line, not a jaggy one, same with core voltage. you will need to go into the msi ab settings to unlock voltage monitoring along with voltage control. but you really should be using the classified voltage tool for voltage tuning, and use msi ab for core and memory clock frequencies.

put a skynet bios on it. your card is made for this.
I am assuming it is probably not power supply. If my PSU was unstable I would have to assume that running Prime95 for a few hours with my CPU @ 4900 would expose some kind of issue with my PSU. I am thinking I need to flash or at least update my BIOS. As soon as I go over 1200 Mhz on the GPU it becomes unstable, raising the voltage has not helped from increments of 13 until I was at 1.212. Been playing with it more and noticing everything is fine otherwise.
 
Sorry, I should have been more specific there. Was just using my CPU power and stability as reference to my power supply. I would assume that if my PSU was having issues then my CPU would have issues holding a stable overclock. And I was assuming that the same would go for my GPU, even though my GPU uses 3 times the power of my CPU. But correct me if I am wrong. Thanks for the help!
 
http://www.overclock.net/t/1411500/official-evga-classified-owners-club

its easy... you should ask there, team skynet will help you.

i flashed my classy in minutes with their skynet bios. it will tremedously help stability and get rid of stupid boost 2.0 and give you a 200% power target.

if you were benching at 1350mhz, which ive gotten mine too.. you were well past the 115% power target and your card was throttling. you need the bios to unlock higher, i believe i was at a 133% power target running 1375mhz core to stop throttling. that is why your voltage was dropping as the card protected itself. also you should use msi afterburner instead of precision.

you will also want to get the classified voltage tool so you can control voltage with it, also you can raise the pwm frequency to help stability, along with memory voltage.
 
It just seems to be terribly unstable in general on precision x, but only with certain games. It benchmarks fine in Heaven, I think i was getting about 78 FPS with tesselation on normal. I did clock it back down to 1290 because I was going over 100% power in heaven at 1350 Mhz. No games will run at that speed for me. But when I launch some games I get crashes at anything over 1220 Mhz, especially HAWKEN. Game loads fine and logs in fine, but as soon as I deploy to battlefield it crashes and resets me to default. Precision X will still say it is at 1290 Mhz but GPUZ only reports 531 or 836Mhz. I don't know where the 531 even comes from. Last night I got a BSOD on it and then reset to default and back to 1200 and it seems stable. Anything over that and I am over power target until I raise voltage and as soon as I raise voltage I get instability when the core starts clocking up during load screens. Thanks for the info. I will check their forums as well!
 
you should use msi afterburner. load msi ab up, put in whatever overclock your running, and load up your game. let it crash, or whatever. look at msi ab's hardware monitor and what it reports the power target is. if its maxing out your power target, which would be 115% if your on the ln2 bios, then that is your problem. you can look at the other things like the core clock, which should show a steady line, not a jaggy one, same with core voltage. you will need to go into the msi ab settings to unlock voltage monitoring along with voltage control. but you really should be using the classified voltage tool for voltage tuning, and use msi ab for core and memory clock frequencies.

put a skynet bios on it. your card is made for this.
 
Solution


Do I need to uninstall Precision X? Is it even worth using Precision X?
 
I am also planning on building a custom loop and putting an EK block on the card at some point soon(waiting for paychecks from the new job). I also would like to SLI a second one also with an EK block.
 


you don't necessarily have to uninstall precision x, but it would be a good idea since you won't be using it. everybody uses msi ab for their classifieds. i heard msi ab has more stable over clocks, but this doesn't really make much sense to me. precision x is just a copy of msi ab anyways using the riva tuner tools.

your going to need a good 360 rad and d5 pump for two classifieds.
 


With out flashing BIOS I have noticed instant difference going to AB and CVC. Core clock so far is running stable at 1306 Mhz with 1.206V on CVC. The boost in CVC only actually puts me at 1.99V but it holds steady there and framerates are now a constant over 70 FPS. My games that were crashing on load are now running very clean. Thanks for the help, I will let you know how things hold up, will probably flash LN2 BIOS with Skyn3t once i can find a good download for it. Thanks!
 


just download gpuz and backup your stock ln2 bios and note what gpuz says your bios revision is… 80.80.xx.xx or whatever. then post on the forum i linked you to asking which classified bios you need for your revision number. then all you need is nvflash and its takes a minute or two.
 
My onboard BIOS is 80.80.21.01.80 (P2083-0021). I haven't gotten a response from Overclock.net yet. I am just not sure I if I need to use the Rev # 3 BIOS or the Rev #4 BIOS. Rev #3 matches my version # in it's description. Just not sure. Thanks for the help!
 


yes, if rev#3 matches your stock bios then that is the one you want. i believe if i remember correctly that was my bios revision too.
 


are you on windows 8?

im pretty sure you can hold down "shift" and right click for both windows 7 or 8. im doing it right now on win7 and its labled as "open command window here"

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/9702-command-prompt-open-windows-8-a.html

 
Just opened command prompt through the menu then navigated to my folder with NVFlash from there. Seems to have flashed fine. I now have the 300% Power Limit. Card runs at 888 unless I open a game or benchmarking program then it instantly goes up to 1111 until game launch. I have my clock set to 1280 for now to see how well it works. Still notice some artifacts over 1306 Mhz though on Heaven and Valley. The crashes seem to be better, as in it hasn't crashed yet.
 


at what voltage? i believe i started having artifacts at around 1330 with 1.212v.
 


So, I set my voltage at 1.212 but that's not what GPUz tells me I am getting. It tells me its aroung 1.199 volts at that setting. As soon as I bump up to 1306 from 1293 I start getting artifacts no matter the voltage. If I start bumping the voltage higher then my temps hit my limit(around 82C) and my GPU starts throttling. Or likewise if I start popping my power target over 150% my temps still climb too high. It'll be nice if I can build a loop soon and get an EK block on it. 1280-1293 Mhz seem pretty comfortable anyway, especially with the Skyn3t BIOS.

 

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