Overclocking help with GTX 550 Ti and AMD 7970

iyzik

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Jun 1, 2012
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Howdy, I currently have a GTX 550 Ti and my 7970 should be arriving today. I have been playing with overclocking on my smaller rig w/ gtx550 today, the card I have is an EVGA GTX 550 Ti 2GB Superclocked so the core speed is 972 MHz (72 higher than defualt) and today I OC with MSI AB up to 1025 MHz. Now what I am curious about is do I also need to be turning up voltage? becuase the sliders for power are locked in Afterburner and in GPU-Z the voltage seems to dynamically increase itself with the OC...? Also should I be increasing memory clock and if so how much?

Also same questions for a 7970 which I believe is coming with a core clock of 1050 MHz. (HIS IceQ X2)
 
Solution
I have a GTX 550 ti 2gb VRAM as well, same "superclock" as well, bought mine from Bestbuy for a starter card, love it a lot actually.

When overclocking you should be testing the card with MSI Kombustor as well to ensure there aren't any artifacts(deficiencies to generated video) and to also see the max temperature of your GPU. I overclocked mine to 1000MHz core clock and 2000MHz Shader clock, didn't touch the memory and I ran Kombustor. My max temp with a custom fan profile is 65C(which is more than good) and I didn't see any artifacts for the 2 hours I ran it.

Now, the ONLY reason to up the voltage is when you overclock the core, shader and memory clock until you see artifacts in Kombustor. If you start to see artifacts then you must...

echondo

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May 29, 2012
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I have a GTX 550 ti 2gb VRAM as well, same "superclock" as well, bought mine from Bestbuy for a starter card, love it a lot actually.

When overclocking you should be testing the card with MSI Kombustor as well to ensure there aren't any artifacts(deficiencies to generated video) and to also see the max temperature of your GPU. I overclocked mine to 1000MHz core clock and 2000MHz Shader clock, didn't touch the memory and I ran Kombustor. My max temp with a custom fan profile is 65C(which is more than good) and I didn't see any artifacts for the 2 hours I ran it.

Now, the ONLY reason to up the voltage is when you overclock the core, shader and memory clock until you see artifacts in Kombustor. If you start to see artifacts then you must up the voltage VERY LITTLE until you see no more artifacts and THEN you can continue to overclock even further.

Note: changing your voltage can damage the card, make it run HOTTER or other mysterious occurrences of unstableness.

Your 7970 shouldn't need ANY overclocking because of how powerful the card is already at stable clocks, shader etc. Also when you run MSI Kombustor, your GPU will be at 100% load for whatever time you run it for, so monitor the temps accurately, NVidia says the max temperature the GTX 550ti can handle is 100C but I would keep it MAX at 80C for safety precautions.

Scroll down to see the temperature and Wattage specs;
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-550ti/specifications

Good luck!
 
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iyzik

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^^ same got mine from bestbuy same reason and despite terrible reputation this certain version seems like an amazing card.

Thank you for the very thourough answer! That is very helpful.
I realize the 7970 probably shouldn't need it but it is not performing quite as well as I expected in bf3 :( in fact even with OC on big maps with explosions can drop to 40 fps