GTX 780 OC question (kinda dumb)

[understocked]

Hello guys

I am quite a noob in OC and PC customization as general (and I apologize for any of my questions if they seem bit dumb to you guys), I am intend to purchase (saved up enough) a GTX 780 to replace my GTX 650. Now the questions that bother me the most are two:

1) My PSU is Sliverstone Strider 600W, which is the minimum requirement for a GTX 780; however, as I've heard from many reviews, it would be a shame not OCing GTX 780, so my first question is whether I will be able to OC this card with this PSU (say about 5 - 10%).

2) This has something to do with my entire setup, I am running on an i5 3570K on stock speed with a stock fan (haven't got an after market cooler, attempted OC this and got like 85C to even 90c unfortunately), although I've heard there would be nothing wrong with an i5 3570k with GTX 780, however, most of the formal reviews I've read they OC CPU before they start benchmarking, would that be really a big difference in terms of GPU performance cuz I cannot seeing myself overclock my CPU with my current setup.

MY current setup is listed as below:

i5 3570k
ASRock Z77 Extreme4
GTX 650
G.Skill Sniper F3 12800CL9D 8GB DDR 3(2*4)
Samsung 840 120 SSD
1TB HDD (it's Barracuda I believe)
Silverstone Strider Plus 600W ST60F-P
Win 7 Home Premium 64bits


Thanks you
Dave

 

[cookybiscuit]

1. Totally fine. I'm running an identical setup to you with my processor at 4.5 and card at 1202/7000 on a 520w Silverstone PSU, no issues.

2. Huge difference. With a card as fast as a 780 you really need to overclock the processor to get the most out of it, in CPU dependent games the GPU will just be sitting around waiting for the CPU to catch up. You can get a Hyper 212 Evo for next to nothing and overclock your processor to 4.2Ghz with no effort at all.

 

[17seconds]

You will be fine with that PSU, much more than enough headroom for overclocking your GPU and entire system. Guru3d recommends a 550 watt PSU for a factory overclocked GTX780 on a high-power overclocked system.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/palit_geforce_gtx_780_super_jetstream_review,7.html

Once you get everything up and running, the best way to judge bottlenecking is to run MSI Afterburner (or other similar Rivatuner based utility, i.e. Precision X). Run the hardware monitor graph, play a game with VSync turned OFF, and then check your GPU usage on the graph. 99% GPU usage means that your GPU is running at full throttle with no bottlenecking... for that particular game. Anything below 99% represents the amount of bottlenecking.

Be sure to try different games and different settings as the GPU usage will vary. If you see consistently that your GPU usage is, say, around 75% then that's a good sign that you should overclock your CPU to eliminate the bottleneck, and/or increase your GPU settings (AA, AF, higher quality texture filtering, etc.) to place more stress on the GPU. Again, make sure that VSync is turned off when checking for a bottleneck.

 

[understocked]

You will be fine with that PSU, much more than enough headroom for overclocking your GPU and entire system. Guru3d recommends a 550 watt PSU for a factory overclocked GTX780 on a high-power overclocked system.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/palit_geforce_gtx_780_super_jetstream_review,7.html

Once you get everything up and running, the best way to judge bottlenecking is to run MSI Afterburner (or other similar Rivatuner based utility, i.e. Precision X). Run the hardware monitor graph, play a game with VSync turned OFF, and then check your GPU usage on the graph. 99% GPU usage means that your GPU is running at full throttle with no bottlenecking... for that particular game. Anything below 99% represents the amount of bottlenecking.

Be sure to try different games and different settings as the GPU usage will vary. If you see consistently that your GPU usage is, say, around 75% then that's a good sign that you should overclock your CPU to eliminate the bottleneck, and/or increase your GPU settings (AA, AF, higher quality texture filtering, etc.) to place more stress on the GPU. Again, make sure that VSync is turned off when checking for a bottleneck.

Okay I got the card (Gigabyte GTX 780 Windforce OC), but there seems to be a new issue: every now and then the driver crashes during gameplay. I will provide some details.

Most of the crashes occur in Sniper Elite V2 (or Nazi Zombie), the symptoms are basically the same, freeze up then crashes back to desktop with a message saying nvidia driver has crashed and recovered. The crashes are also evident in Metro Last Light (about three times), one time in Crysis 3 and one time in Battlefield 3. However, there are no crashes or weird artifacts outside of gaming

After reading through dozens of comments with suggested solutions. I have done the following steps trying to prevent this:

1) Clean Re-installation of 320.49 WQHL Nvidia Driver: this doesn't solve the problem, crash & recover still exists to various extents.

2) Reducing in-game visual setting and disabling windows aero: do not solve the problem

3) Using Afterburner to manually set fan speed: some suggest it might be video card's problem with heat, so I change the fan speed to see if helps. After this one crash in Battlefield 3 (one and only for bf 3) and another crash in Metro Last Light benchmark session. The BF3 gameplay lasts for about 45-50 minutes, crashed at a QTE event, after I disable Geforce Experience the issue seems to disappear: 3 hours of gameplay no crashes. Metro Last Light benchmark crash seems to be related with PhysX, the crash occurs at the first explosion scene (where PhysX seems to work up at this spot usually).

Both crashes occured after I installed 326.01 driver, on 320.49 WQHL issues are worse.

Note: I had this PhysX trashing fps issue caused by auto-recommend setting for physx in Nvidia control panel, solved after switching it to physx-gpu.

4) Clean installation of 326.01 Nvidia Driver: although knowning this is a driver for windows 8.1 preview, some suggest it solve their crash & recover problems (they are on windows 7 64 as well). After 326.01 I ran some benchmark, such as using Metro Last Light/2033 benchmark utility to run 18 times (with physx on), both had no crashes. However, as the previous dotpoint showed, crashes occurred again in Metro Last Light benchmark session.

I know the "crash & recovery" issue is quite common among GTX 700 series, so I would like to know how you guys interpret this issue (or more precisely, the symptoms on my PC).

Much Appreciated

 

[17seconds]

How about you report on your GPU temps, GPU usage, fan speeds, and core clock speeds when gaming?

 

[understocked]

How about you report on your GPU temps, GPU usage, fan speeds, and core clock speeds when gaming?

Here are some in-game number
Core Temp: 55-57
GPU Usage: 99
Fan Speed: 57
Core Clock 1084

I am considering RMA it and get a replacement, also some suggest it might be a faulty PSU.

Note: I believe it is a TDR issue with nvidia's 320.** driver and GTX 700 series, lots of people have been complaining on Nvidia's forum.

 

[cookybiscuit]

I'm an idiot.

 

[yialanliu]

If its hitting 100C then its faulty, with how good the Windforce cooler is you could probably idle the fans and get that on a working card. RMA it.

I read he's hitting 55-57 with an overclock which is perfectly fine...

 

[cookybiscuit]

Yea I was thinking 'core temp' was his CPU temperature and just read the one under as GPU 'temp', so I can't read.

 

[understocked]

If its hitting 100C then its faulty, with how good the Windforce cooler is you could probably idle the fans and get that on a working card. RMA it.

I read he's hitting 55-57 with an overclock which is perfectly fine...

It's factory OC just for the record. The problem is some games keeps crashing on 320.49/.18 driver. Sniper Elite v2/Nazi Zombie is by far the worst, every gameplay sessions are ended with crash (most time TDR, you can still fire guns after the blank screen kicks in); Metro LL has occasional crashes but it happens most with physx enabled (now my physx is totally trashed). Never crashed in Saints Row The Third (dx10/11 mode), Sins of Solar Empire: Rebellion; only once in Battlefield 3 (for about 45 minutes, after I disabled GF experience in the background the problem disappear for that moment with gameplay lasts about 2.5 hours; however, this does not work for sniper elite v2).

I have some suspicion about my PSU (Silverstone strider 600w), my guess is it is not powering enough juice to the system (afterburner shows the max power percentage in Metro LL is 79). Might consider an ANTEC HCG .

UPDATE: Gigabyte recommends 320.11 driver which seems to be a GTX 780 only driver.

Some folks on Guru3d claim this solves their problems, however notice most of them are all using PSU with 700W+
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=378813

 

[cookybiscuit]

That PSU should be totally fine, I ran a 780 with my old 550w Strider PSU with no issues, other than the blackouts obviously, but I've had that across that PSU, the one I have now and a HX850. I wouldn't go overboard swapping out hardware until you know for sure theres an issue, check this.

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/548402/geforce-drivers/official-nvidia-320-49-beta-display-driver-feedback-thread-released-6-25-13-/

At most, reinstall Windows.