I've had the setup in my signature for about a year now. I bought it used from a guy who originally wanted to be a game streamer, but ended up suddenly leaving the country without his PC. All of the components were disassembled and stored in their original boxes when I bought it. As far as I can tell, he never overclocked anything and don't believe he used it for crypto mining. When I first started using it for gaming, I didn't overclock anything, since it ran most games fairly well at stock speeds. Eventually, I decided to give it a go and push it to its limits. The GPU overclock was disappointing to say the least. An increase of only about 20-30 MHz caused it to become unstable in Unigine benchmarks. Assuming I lost the silicon lottery, I was content with stock speeds.
Over time, more and more games would crash. Oddly enough, running games above 60 Hz refresh rate was the biggest culprit, so I settled for 60 Hz. Seemed like a shame to have a 144Hz monitor, so I tried underclocking my GPU by about -50 MHz, which seemed to do the trick. Eventually, my GPU became so unstable that games were crashing regardless of the settings I used. Even Unigine benchmarks could only run for a short period of time before crashing, where originally they easily ran the whole length at stock speeds.
I've never seen a GPU degrade so drastically over a short period of time, so I tried doing some basic diagnostics. I did a clean driver installation using DDU, I updated my BIOS, cleaned out the GPU with compressed air, re-seated it in the motherboard, tried a different PSU, but nothing helped. I even plugged in an old GTX 760, which had no stability issues with the same system, even at a 100 MHz overclock. Temperatures seemed normal as well. Idle was about 30-40 C and under load was about 60-70 C, with a max temp of about 74 C. Nothing outrageous, but it could be better.
Assuming temperature was the issue, I decided to buy a couple more 120 mm fans for my case and re-apply some new thermal paste. The factory thermal paste looked terrible. Only a thin dried out layer on the top of the chip and most of it was squeezed to the sides. I applied some Arctic MX-4 and plugged it back in. Temperatures were drastically better. Idle was now 27 C and full load was max 59 C. By using a more aggressive fan curve, I was able to drop that to 25 C and 55 C.
Things were back to being stable, so I tried overclocking again. Same problem. Even before reaching the max temperature, a modest overclock of 30 MHz would cause the Unigine Superposition benchmark to crash.
Any thoughts on how can get the most out this GPU?
Over time, more and more games would crash. Oddly enough, running games above 60 Hz refresh rate was the biggest culprit, so I settled for 60 Hz. Seemed like a shame to have a 144Hz monitor, so I tried underclocking my GPU by about -50 MHz, which seemed to do the trick. Eventually, my GPU became so unstable that games were crashing regardless of the settings I used. Even Unigine benchmarks could only run for a short period of time before crashing, where originally they easily ran the whole length at stock speeds.
I've never seen a GPU degrade so drastically over a short period of time, so I tried doing some basic diagnostics. I did a clean driver installation using DDU, I updated my BIOS, cleaned out the GPU with compressed air, re-seated it in the motherboard, tried a different PSU, but nothing helped. I even plugged in an old GTX 760, which had no stability issues with the same system, even at a 100 MHz overclock. Temperatures seemed normal as well. Idle was about 30-40 C and under load was about 60-70 C, with a max temp of about 74 C. Nothing outrageous, but it could be better.
Assuming temperature was the issue, I decided to buy a couple more 120 mm fans for my case and re-apply some new thermal paste. The factory thermal paste looked terrible. Only a thin dried out layer on the top of the chip and most of it was squeezed to the sides. I applied some Arctic MX-4 and plugged it back in. Temperatures were drastically better. Idle was now 27 C and full load was max 59 C. By using a more aggressive fan curve, I was able to drop that to 25 C and 55 C.
Things were back to being stable, so I tried overclocking again. Same problem. Even before reaching the max temperature, a modest overclock of 30 MHz would cause the Unigine Superposition benchmark to crash.
Any thoughts on how can get the most out this GPU?