EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified - Locked Voltage? Help, pls.

[airplanek8]

Hey guys,

So I'm trying to get a little more juice out of the EVGA 980Ti classified and I've reached my comfortable point temperature. My temps are staying at 69c Max while under intensive GPU load, but sometimes I get a driver reset error crashing my games. I've had Heaven 4.0 run for about 4 hours straight with no problems. I've increased power to 115%, and have enabled maximum performance in the control panel. I'm using afterburner and I have added the 1 values to the corresponding fields and EULA in the CFG file. I've also unlocked voltage in afterburner settings. However, I am unable to go beyond 1.212v on the card. Even if I increase it to +50mv, All software reports a max of 1.212v under load. I'm trying to just increase it a little bit to see if this stabilizes my overclock (who knows, maybe push a little further) and I get rid of the driver crash. I've saved my GPU's bios and I'm ready to flash to a custom one if need be to unlock the voltage.

If you think I missed something, please let me know, or if you could guide me towards the right BIOS to get rid of this limit, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks guys!

This is my card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487146

Cheers!

 

[iamacow]

Welcome to Nvidia and locking the voltage in the bios. Your only option is to flash it to a custom bios to turn off all the safety features. I'm not sure which ones are available for the 980 ti, but the last series (700) had a custom bios called Skynet which turned off boost 2.0 and voltage limits. Of course with these limits off, you can kill the card is seconds if you raise the voltage to high.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1411500/official-evga-classified-k-ngp-n-owners-club

http://www.overclock.net/t/1558645/official-nvidia-gtx-980-ti-owners-club

 

[airplanek8]

Welcome to Nvidia and locking the voltage in the bios. Your only option is to flash it to a custom bios to turn off all the safety features. I'm not sure which ones are available for the 980 ti, but the last series (700) had a custom bios called Skynet which turned off boost 2.0 and voltage limits. Of course with these limits off, you can kill the card is seconds if you raise the voltage to high.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1411500/official-evga-classified-k-ngp-n-owners-club

http://www.overclock.net/t/1558645/official-nvidia-gtx-980-ti-owners-club

First of all, thanks for your quick help! The first tool in the link, actually allows me to change the voltage which is great! I opened it and noticed that it shows slightly lower voltage than what MSI afterburner is reporting (1.212v) which is also what GPUZ reports. How should I approach this discrepancy in order to up my voltage slightly just enough to stabilize my current clock? I most definitely do not want to fry my card 😀 Also, with this tool in hand, would I still need to flash the bios in order to unlock it, thus allowing the tool to work? I ask because if I can bypass the flash, I'd definitely go that route!

Thanks for your help once again!

 

[iamacow]

I don't have that card so I really can't say. The regulator way is to flash the bios to a custom one. But if you can bypass the voltage lock without flashing that would be just as good. Basically when I said you can fry you card is because nothing will stop you from pumping another .5v or even 1v into the card from the software. If you move the slider to allow 1.3 or 1.4v you could kill you card just by clicking "apply". Flashing the bios won't do any physical damage. Just let you bypass nvidias safety lockouts.

 

[airplanek8]

Thank you buddy! I actually used the Maxwell II tool to generate a new bios with a higher vcore from my default bios, extracted with GPUZ, and it seemed to do the trick for now. The software is still reporting 1.212v, but I've actually been able to increase the core clock by an additional 20Mhz and maintain a stable benchmark session of 2 hours.

Thank you for your help!