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.
lovin it. Absolutely amazing card for the price and I can't wait to sli them in the future.
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