GTX 970 overclock results!

[jty0yt]

So on my GTX 970 I have upped the core my 120 MHZ observing a boost clock of 1479mhz. MY fans are around 50 percent at 100 percent usage and the temps are 52 degrees! I have only upped the voltage by 15 MV and the power limit to 105%. I love this card, give me your results below!

 

[DirtyHarryCNO]

3DMark - Firestrike
[Factory] Score: 9415
[Overclocked]: Score: 10404

11% increase

I would like to hear from other people with this same card. It does not have to be an MSI card, just a GTX 970, though I have read that the MSI card is the most willing to be overclocked, perhaps due to a more effective cooling system?

Stupid question: The reason why MSI Afterburner shows Memory Clock to be half of what it is in other Tweaking apps in this post is because it shows the clock rate of the memory bus with the 2x multiplier of a DDR bus (Dounbe Data Rate)?

I cannot get Core Clock above +200 MHz, even at +210 MHz the drivers crashes as soon as GPU Usage reaches 100%, but at +200 MHz the system is very stable.

What benefit is there to gain from unlocking core voltage? And do the two power connectors on the card need to be feed from separate cords, each connected directly to the PSU? When I first installed the card I could not find two separate power cords so I connected both power inlets to the same cord and yet the card ran flawlessly. I have found the other cord, so now the card IS connected with separate cords. Does this have any influence on performance and/or overclocking potential? (Corsair 750w PSU)

Vram opperates in quad channel in GDDR5, some programs like GPUZ read the mem clock speed before any doubling. The Afterburner reading doubles it once. In reality GDDR5 card memory operates at double that again, effectively quadruple the base speed.
Average observed core clocks for the 970s seems to be in the 1500-1550s, and mem clocks vary more with a average of 7900-8000. I bet with +200 core you well fall into that range, maybe even exceed it, but that is something you'd have to check in Afterburner under load (the GPU clocks its self a little higher on top of that).

Unlocking the voltage simply gives you the ability to change it. The 970s have safety features and limits in vbios that prohibit excessive voltage anyways, but maxing out the voltage slider on afterburner is a safe thing to do and usually gives people a little extra core and mem clock.

Connecting the power with separate cords might help a little bit, but depends on the electrical load, which I don't know much about.

Many of the different types of 970s start with a different clock, so use Afterburner's graph reading to measure the core clock speed and mem clock speed under load.
For Firestrike it is important to realise that your CPU plays a big part in the total score, but if you look at the 3 composite scores that make up the total score (Graphic, Physic and Combined) we could compare graphics scores.

My stock speeds are 1404 core / 1815 mem
Overclocked speeds are 1616 core / 2008 (4016, 8032) mem

My stock speed graphic score is 12423
My overclocked graphic score is 14047

13% Increase

For the Kombustor tests I'd need to know the presets for your test to make mine comprable.
I think Heaven is a better benching software however, and I'd recommend you use that.

 

[filenotfound]

I got some pretty sweet results with my Gigabyte G1 970 after a day's work,
I used a bios reflash to bump up my TDP to effective 125% and a slight bump in voltage maximum 1.275 over 1.262 stock.
I was able to do some kombuster tests at 1601mhz core and 8400 mem so I transcribed my overclock to heaven 4.0.

Unfortunately the high memory clock resulted in artifacting and eventual crash, I found 8090 to be the sweet spot where I finished this heaven run. The core clock might have a little headroom, but my perfcap was bouncing off of TDP limit and voltage limit the entire run anyways. Still... needs.... more... powwweerr!!

edit: I reflashed the BIOS for 1606 core and it turns out my TDP limit was not properly raised for that previous run, for 1606/8090 I made 85.8 fps, score 2162. It was pinned to max voltage the entire time.

Im wondering could you upload your stable 1606 core bios?

i also have a g1 970 and am looking to atleast get 1500 stable, but with stock bios settings, it isnt stable what so ever.

Just want to see what you are changing in the bios to get such high overclocks stable. (as a reference)

 

[DirtyHarryCNO]

I got my bios from here, http://

Though I should note that I was stable at 1570 / 8100 or so prior to flashing my bios, so I'm thinking you may have another issue. Is your PSU good? Are you using msi afterburner?

 

[filenotfound]

I got my bios from here, http://

Though I should note that I was stable at 1570 / 8100 or so prior to flashing my bios, so I'm thinking you may have another issue. Is your PSU good? Are you using msi afterburner?

corsair HX750 PSU. and im using the latest nvidia beta drivers, 347.09
and yes using afetrburner 4.0 (guess i can try updating to 4.1).

but using
+87mv
+112% power limit
+150 core clock (1492mhz)
+500 memory

my gpu drivers usually crash when gaming sometimes or sometimes when running stress tests. (think it happens most when the gpu load go up and down quickly, ie going on loading screen between areas or something).
Happened with last few drivers aswell, and only happens while overclocked.

temperatures are usually in the low 60s under load overclocked and running stress tests.

 

[DirtyHarryCNO]

Thats a great PSU. But hold on, when you are measuring this 1492 mhz, are you using Afterburner's charts on the right hand side while the card is at load or are you using GPU-Z stated boost clock? You can alternatively use GPU-Z under the sensors tab to measure core speed when the card is at load.

I ask because the boost clock stated in GPU-Z is more of a baseline and the card will actually clock itself much higher. My boost clock is stated to be 1546 for example, while my actual speed is 1626 (Got it to this speed for firestrike)

 

[filenotfound]

Thats a great PSU. But hold on, when you are measuring this 1492 mhz, are you using Afterburner's charts on the right hand side while the card is at load or are you using GPU-Z stated boost clock? You can alternatively use GPU-Z under the sensors tab to measure core speed when the card is at load.

I ask because the boost clock stated in GPU-Z is more of a baseline and the card will actually clock itself much higher. My boost clock is stated to be 1546 for example, while my actual speed is 1626 (Got it to this speed for firestrike)

i use msi afterburner for gpu stats. i like it since it gives pretty much all data on the gpu in real time.

 

[DirtyHarryCNO]

Id consider exchanging the card, it sounds like you got one with below average overclocking ability. A new vbios might help some, but even then you might get to the average mark 1500-1550 but I'd only do this after trying to exchange it.

 

[Zackery Underdown]

EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0

Right now I'm at 1512 MHz on stock voltage (+120). Temps get up to 72 C in FurMark, but my fan profile is set to max out at 50% and it runs quiet, so I'm very comfortable with that. This thing boosted to 1392 MHz right out of the box, which is just bananas. I haven't bothered OC'ing the memory yet.

I read a lot of negative feedback on various forums about how awful the EVGA versions are, but I'm experiencing zero coil whine, and as long as you keep a conservative fan profile, it's crazy quiet. And you can overclock the nuts off it.

FWIW, I ran Heaven 4.0 and scored a 1977 (78.5 FPS) using the default "Extreme" 1600 x 900 setting (not 1920 x 1080; I like to OC using a window and burn-in at 1080).

i have this exact same card. mine ran at 1506mhz out of the box and after overclocking it myself i got it to 1600mhz. i might be able to push it further but to be honest i kinda want to leave it at 1600mhz just because i havnt seen any reach that without water cooling. i also have the memory running at 8ghz over the stock 7ghz

 

[Omnomious]

I don't understand how you guys are getting such high scores.. mine is 1500 with vsync off, but when I use vsync it's even lower.. like 900ish.. what the heck is up with mine?

 

[Bambie8655]

Found something that's pretty strange. My last clock MSI 970 clock @ 1556MHZ (+225 core, +550mem, 1225mv) was crashing some games so I took it back into heaven and found a few artifacts I didn't find last time, due to the core.

Now I reduced the core clock to +215, but raised the memory to +600 and increased the voltage to the hardware lock of 1250mV (I just did +87mV) which gave me an actual clock of 1556 MHZ again, and 1543MHZ without voltage and resulted in no artifacts, and appears stable so far in games. I even benchmarked heaven 4.0 and stressed Alien Isolation, Watch dogs, and the internet at the same time and it didn't crash or produce artifacts.

So I compensated the performance loss from the core by upping the mem to its absolute performance max (650 is unstable), but increased the voltage to gain the highest clock possible which ended up being the SAME freq clock speed as the previous unstable clock with different settings...wtf? It looks like increasing the voltage is actually useful and does increase performance past the max stable core clock.

Final max stable clock: Will be testing this for a bit and will update.
1556MHZ @ 51-54C full load
+110% Power target
+215 core - maxed out before artifacts start occuring
+600mem - will be using this for a while unless unstable
+87mV - results in slight clock increase so will leave this on
104-106% - TDP highest I've seen so far on my card.


I hear the msi 970's crappy 110% power limit prevents this card from reaching clocks of 1.6GHZ, sourced here http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/09/29/msi_geforce_gtx_970_gaming_4g_video_card_review/8.

1540-1545 seems like the max stable clock I've seen so far, although I think I might've just won the gold cup. I'm curious to know if anyone has higher clocks on the MSI version.

I will also add that my card msi gaming 970 came with a clock of 1328mhz, and not 1366.

As soon as I saw this post I was like...nah...I went and overclocked my MSI 970 to 1632 with +25v right away with no artifacts. I did hit 1.7 but the screen would start tearing and whatnot. But it isn't impossible for an MSI card to hit 1.6.

 

[malditor]

lol, gotta say nice edit. almost believable XD now if only you edited the bigger score to the bottom pic with the higher avg FPS. i mean really? how does 65FPS avg score higher then 82FPS avg? XD nice try trying to troll.

At minimum, his bottom score is legitimate with his numbers and score being very close to mine. But I don't see an Extreme HD preset anywhere.

For AAx8 1080p, Ultra and Extreme Tessellation, I get:
<a href="http://imgur.com/Wy3fBLe"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Wy3fBLe.jpg" title="source: imgur.com" /></a>[/img]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, the best I've gotten so far is:

That's with these settings:

What do I need to change, if anything to get a better score while being stable.

 

[chrysalis]

my evga FTW 970 hits boost 1405 without me doing anything, on manual overclocking I could only get it to 1485. Higher then that and is TDR's with unigine.

seems evga cards are lower binned ones and evga for whatever reason decided to go cheap with the 970s, I am probably going to do a stepup to a FTW+.

 

[harley2ride]

I have an EVGA GTX970 FTW. So far I have overclocked it to power at 110, +120 gpu, and +400, with the Boost locked it showed 1538. Firestike Ultra overall was 5506. Card wasn't even warm at these settings and the screen was smooth.

 

[b1gdeano]

Well after much faffing I have settled to what seems to be working

I get a boost clock of 1514Mhz & Mem @ 1900Mhz so 7600Mhz effective

I cant get the memory to go to 8Ghz without artifacting - to be honest it artifacts any higher than what I have - sometimes worse than others.

I think it is heat on the VRAM modules that cause it as seem to get better when push fan speeds up high manually - I would rather it be kept a bit lower and quieter though. I even added thermal pads to the back modules - it did help but still cant hit that magic 8Ghz without artifacts showing up

Galax GTX970 EXOC

 

[WalaWalaGamingXyee]

I can only get around 1452mhz boost clock w/o furmark crashing.
In Precision X 16 I have a +135 gpu clock offset and a +417 memory clock.
I feel like i should be able to get more out of my card. Should i decrease my Memory clock or in crease the Power/voltage. Power/voltage are at stock.
valley benchmarks:
Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0
FPS:53.8
Score:2252
Min FPS:28.8
Max FPS:60.4
SystemPlatform:Windows 8 (build 9200) 64bit
CPU model:Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz (3999MHz) x4
GPU model:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 9.18.13.4725 (4095MB)
Settings
Render😀irect3D11
Mode:1920x1063 8xAA windowed
PresetCustom
QualityUltra

 

[Ellis_D]

Finally got my new FTW+ after stepping up from the base SC model and I'm currently rocking 1558mhz boost, 8010mhz Memory, and +25mv. I still have plenty of headroom so I'm hoping I can squeeze out a little more after playing with it a bit.

 

[Ser_Seishirou]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

 

[Ellis_D]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

Pics or it didn't happen.

 

[Ser_Seishirou]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

Pics or it didn't happen.

 

[Ellis_D]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

Pics or it didn't happen.

https://imageshack.com/i/f0JxKGMCj https://imageshack.com/i/ipfvX0ZWj https://imageshack.com/i/f0c1v4Swj

Yeah, I don't think that's an actual, functioning overclock. It looks like your GPU is being throttled to oblivion, which would explain why your benchmark score is less than half what a GTX 970 should be doing.

For reference, these are the numbers I get with the stock-settings on my EVGA FTW+

 

[Ser_Seishirou]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

Pics or it didn't happen.

https://imageshack.com/i/f0JxKGMCj https://imageshack.com/i/ipfvX0ZWj https://imageshack.com/i/f0c1v4Swj

Yeah, I don't think that's an actual, functioning overclock. It looks like your GPU is being throttled to oblivion, which would explain why your benchmark score is less than half what a GTX 970 should be doing.

For reference, these are the numbers I get with the stock-settings on my EVGA FTW+

hmm interesting i didn't know that was a thing although it runs games well enough but yeah i do recall getting a little higher score at lower setting i wasn't sure if my CPU was affecting it at all or not (BTW after doing some quick research doesn't throttling only happen when the gpu starts to get too hot my card is well withing safe temps and if there is no artifacts and everything runs fine i wonder why i'm able to OC it so much even if it isn't functional?)

 

[MrSoup]

Woops, didn't see this thread. Here's what I was able to do with Gigabyte G1 970

Seems like I can't push past 125 core clock at all. I tried upping the voltage but it still crashed. 125 is my sweet spot, so I might be able to push memory clock to 550 or even 600.

Using the above settings to run Heaven 4.0

I noticed a few dips that were clearly CPU related. I usually run my i5 2500k at 4.5ghz but I've had it stock for a few days because I haven't had much need to overclock it. Resolution used was my monitor's native but I do have 1080p and 2160x1215 custom resolutions enabled.

 

[Ellis_D]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

Pics or it didn't happen.

https://imageshack.com/i/f0JxKGMCj https://imageshack.com/i/ipfvX0ZWj https://imageshack.com/i/f0c1v4Swj

Yeah, I don't think that's an actual, functioning overclock. It looks like your GPU is being throttled to oblivion, which would explain why your benchmark score is less than half what a GTX 970 should be doing.

For reference, these are the numbers I get with the stock-settings on my EVGA FTW+
http://i.imgur.com/9yrk4Pg.jpg

hmm interesting i didn't know that was a thing although it runs games well enough but yeah i do recall getting a little higher score at lower setting i wasn't sure if my CPU was affecting it at all or not (BTW after doing some quick research doesn't throttling only happen when the gpu starts to get too hot my card is well withing safe temps and if there is no artifacts and everything runs fine i wonder why i'm able to OC it so much even if it isn't functional?)

That is very odd. Have you used the MSI Afterburner statistic tracker to verify that's the actual clock your running at?

I've found that that's the only way to verify the true speed of your system. The stock clocks are very sensitive to input voltage so any deviation can result in a higher or lower clock than what you set manually (for instance, both 970s I've tested had higher stock-clocks than what they were advertised at and manually increasing the voltage by +15mv increased the boost clock by 13mhz without even touching the settings for the clock speed). Also, It seems the Nvidia Boost Clock tries to work within the parameters you set so it might be one of those situations where you are actually using that extreme clock speed but you're only able to utilize maybe 30% of your GPU to prevent harm. Regardless, something isn't working and you need to return to your stock settings before you accidentally fry your GPU.

Honestly, it's extremely rare to see a GTX 970 overclock above 1,600mhz so the 2ghz you're claiming to have is too good to be true and the fact that your benchmark results are so bad prove it.

 

[Ser_Seishirou]

So i just overclocked my GTX 970 the Gigabyte version G1 edition and the core clock was 2019 mhz and a memory clock of 4305 mhz (first time overclocking and i ran it in valley on HD EXTREME preset and got a score of 1165 seemed stable the temp was around 50 and no artifacts

Pics or it didn't happen.

https://imageshack.com/i/f0JxKGMCj https://imageshack.com/i/ipfvX0ZWj https://imageshack.com/i/f0c1v4Swj
Ok according to Afterburner the memory does top out at 4305 but the core clock levels at around 1443 mhz the memory only jumps a few times to that number but usually stays about 3506 mhz it's weird that i'm able to get it to such high numbers even if it won't run at it at all times i'm curious as to why i'm able to do this?

Yeah, I don't think that's an actual, functioning overclock. It looks like your GPU is being throttled to oblivion, which would explain why your benchmark score is less than half what a GTX 970 should be doing.

For reference, these are the numbers I get with the stock-settings on my EVGA FTW+
http://i.imgur.com/9yrk4Pg.jpg

hmm interesting i didn't know that was a thing although it runs games well enough but yeah i do recall getting a little higher score at lower setting i wasn't sure if my CPU was affecting it at all or not (BTW after doing some quick research doesn't throttling only happen when the gpu starts to get too hot my card is well withing safe temps and if there is no artifacts and everything runs fine i wonder why i'm able to OC it so much even if it isn't functional?)

That is very odd. Have you used the MSI Afterburner statistic tracker to verify that's the actual clock your running at?

I've found that that's the only way to verify the true speed of your system. The stock clocks are very sensitive to input voltage so any deviation can result in a higher or lower clock than what you set manually (for instance, both 970s I've tested had higher stock-clocks than what they were advertised at and manually increasing the voltage by +15mv increased the boost clock by 13mhz without even touching the settings for the clock speed). Also, It seems the Nvidia Boost Clock tries to work within the parameters you set so it might be one of those situations where you are actually using that extreme clock speed but you're only able to utilize maybe 30% of your GPU to prevent harm. Regardless, something isn't working and you need to return to your stock settings before you accidentally fry your GPU.

Honestly, it's extremely rare to see a GTX 970 overclock above 1,600mhz so the 2ghz you're claiming to have is too good to be true and the fact that your benchmark results are so bad prove it.

so my score seems to not want to go any higher i'm assuming it's because of my cpu? also it seems to be sitting at 1392 although it can jump to 1592 for some reason and a mem clock of 3506 with it jumping to about 4307 at times

 

[Ellis_D]

Have you tried reverting it back to its stock settings?