My GTX 970 won't go above 1200 mV

[steffeeh]

I know there's a voltage limit on Nvidia cards which for this model don't let you go above 1212 mV (or +37 mV voltage setting).
Though I've seen now that my card never goes above 1200 mV even though I've maxed out the voltage slider, sometimes even being stuck on the stock voltage (1175 mV) for longer periods of time despite intense gameplay.
Now I know the GPU applies the needed voltage, meaning if less is needed then the voltage goes down obviously.
But I've even tried applying unstable core clock ratio for a short period of time just to see if that would make the voltage bump up to the limit as I'm stressing the GPU more.
While that resulted in higher overall voltages (for instance not going below stock voltage that often) it still didn't want to go above 1200 mV, and it still hovered a lot at 1175 mV.

This is happening on all games, as well as Unigine benchmarks, all using heavy graphics settings.

I'm starting to feel that this is causing me to not be able to reach the full overclock potential and stability as my voltage seem to get stuck and not reach the fabricated voltage limit.

I'm currently using Nvidia driver 373.06, and I overclock using EVGA Precision X.

Here are my OC settings if that helps:
- Power Target: 106% Max (actual power draw goes up to 112%)
- Temperature Target: 91C (Prioritized)
- GPU Clock Offset: +250 MHz
- Memory Clock Offset: +300 MHz
- Voltage: +37 mV Max
- Framerate target enabled to 72 FPS, though I don't think this creates this issue as I still don't get full voltage on games where I only reach 40 FPS or so. I also tried disabling this and it made no difference.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the GPU temperature stays smooth at no more than 67C.

 

[Multipack]

Are you using PrecisionX OC?

 

[steffeeh]

Are you using PrecisionX OC?

Yup

 

[Multipack]

What card is it? The ASUS one in your sig? It could have a locked voltage in its BIOS, especially if it's already OC'd out of the box, but maybe try MSI Afterburner. If you can unlock the card's voltage, you will with that. You have to enable voltage control in settings though. Maybe you have to do similar with PrecisionX OC? Have never used it myself.

 

[steffeeh]

Yeah it's the Asus one. It does have a locked maximum voltage, but it's more than 1200 mV (1212 mV) so I'm not hitting the limit. Also when looking at the Voltage Limit in the graph in the OC program there is no activity going on there.

One theory that I have now is that the game I'm currently playing a lot is actually unstable (early access) and crashes the GPU driver very early when overclocking, meaning I believe I got overclock failure when I actually got a game crash that resets the GPU driver, thanks to that I raise the voltage believing I need to when the real issue is a poorly coded game, so I have unnecessarily much voltage added, meaning the overclock draws less voltage than I've set to save heat.
Still investigating in this though.
I'll try pushing the core clock further in other games than the one I play the most, as well as the benchmarks to see how it all works out.

EDIT: I tried with MSI Afterburner and there were no difference.

 

[steffeeh]

So I pretty much squeezed the full juice out of my GPU core clock wise until I got overclock failure while running a well optimized game, and I'm still not utilizing the maximum voltage, I barely even hit 1200 mV this time.
So I am in fact getting crashes because the overclock is unstable and not because a game was poorly coded.
This means that the voltage isn't working as it should, and that I may lose potential clock speeds and stability due to bad voltages.

Now what? Perhaps this is a GPU driver issue?

 

[Multipack]

What do you mean by no voltage activity in the graph? None at all? Am not sure the extra few mV are going to make a massive difference, but the voltage on that card seem to be locked at 1.2v (unless you get custom BIOS) from other threads on this forum I've read. 1400MHz or 1500 at a push seem to be achievable though. What core clock speed are you stable at?

 

[steffeeh]

There is a graph of when the GPU hits the voltage limit (not to be confused with voltage amount), just like temperature limit and power limit, with basically a 0 and a 1 (0= not hitting, 1= hitting limit) and it's not hitting the voltage limit set by Nvidia, so the voltage can actually get higher.
Browsing this card you see it's capped mostly at 1212 mV, and sometimes at 1225 mV, not 1200 mV.

Basically I'm losing 37 mV as it's not being utilized as it should when I increase the voltage beyond default. Because of this, my stable OC is at 1500 MHz, while it could have been 1550 MHz or even more (there are plenty of people getting this card near 1600 MHz).

EDIT: I actually remember now that I've seen the card cap at 1212 mV, so it must be a driver issue.

 

[Multipack]

Peronally I think that's quite an ambitious clock speed at 1.212v. Most seem to get around 1500 http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2384946/questions-overclocking-asus-strix-gtx-970-gpu-tweak.html & http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/11/03/asus_gtx_970_strix_directcu_ii_video_card_review/3#.V_6I0iTmjcs & http://www.overclock.net/t/1577623/asus-gtx-970-strix-overclock-results for example