Overclocking gtx 970

[jhark515]

I've got an EVGA GTX 970 FTW+ and I'm totally new to overclocking. I watched a couple tutorials and learned a bit, and decided to give it a try. I'm not looking for anything crazy just a little extra performance so I turned up my fan speed a bit, and set the core frequency setting in msi afterburner to 150, the card was already doing about 1300MHz in game so this brought it up to about 1450, but then i noticed that while i was looking at the graph that part of it was yellow and it said 1550 MHz. What does this mean and is it bad? I wasn't getting any crashing in games. I played some bf4 and fallout 4 to make sure it was stable, and my temps never went above 55 degrees c. I did get an fps boost but i'm just worried about messing up my card. Could someone tell me if I did something wrong and what that yellow line means? I'm a bit confused.

EDIT: If I'm just an idiot and am doing everything wrong feel free to tell me haha. Also if anybody has an helpful videos of links to help me learn about OCing hit me up with those too!

 

[neo_classical]

I have to be honest - I'm like you. I've done it in small increments and again waited to see what would happen (if anything). What I have learnt is that if you are just overclocking like that, you're not going to cause any damage to your card. The worst that will happen is that the game will become unstable and you'll have to reduce your overclock back a bit.
With regards to the extra 250MHz in game that you're getting, the 970 has a boost clock feature:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970/specifications
This is a feature, where the card will run at a higher frequency if it's cool enough. And with nice temperatures like you're getting (which the 9 series is renowned for) that's most probably the cause of it

 

[jhark515]

Thanks for the answer but what does the yellow line mean on the msi afterburner graph, should I be concerned?

 

[Sergeant_Sneaky]

Thanks for the answer but what does the yellow line mean on the msi afterburner graph, should I be concerned?

It just means the number that is current is higher than the max on the graph, you can adjust the max numbers in the settings of MSI Afterburner.

 

[Vellinious]

I've got an EVGA GTX 970 FTW+ and I'm totally new to overclocking. I watched a couple tutorials and learned a bit, and decided to give it a try. I'm not looking for anything crazy just a little extra performance so I turned up my fan speed a bit, and set the core frequency setting in msi afterburner to 150, the card was already doing about 1300MHz in game so this brought it up to about 1450, but then i noticed that while i was looking at the graph that part of it was yellow and it said 1550 MHz. What does this mean and is it bad? I wasn't getting any crashing in games. I played some bf4 and fallout 4 to make sure it was stable, and my temps never went above 55 degrees c. I did get an fps boost but i'm just worried about messing up my card. Could someone tell me if I did something wrong and what that yellow line means? I'm a bit confused.

EDIT: If I'm just an idiot and am doing everything wrong feel free to tell me haha. Also if anybody has an helpful videos of links to help me learn about OCing hit me up with those too!

1550 is just fine for the core, you should really try to get your memory clock up a little bit too...it'll help overall performance. As a real easy overclock on just about every 970 out there, I tell people to start at around 1500 to 1530 on the core, and 1950 to 2100 on the memory. Make sure during ANY overclocking, you have the power target slider at max. Always, max.

Make sure you have GPUz, sensors tab open and watching the max core clock, max memory clock, and max voltage that the card is hitting. And pay particular attention to the "PERF CAP REASON" line...that's the 2nd from the bottom. If you start seeing green, you need to either back off the core clock or the memory, because you're hitting a "PWR" perf cap reason, and it will throttle your clocks down to get back under the power limit.

PWR perf cap:

NO PWR Perf Cap: