Will I damage my GPU by increasing it's voltage to +12.5 mV?

[daynwsowulf]

Hello Tom's Hardware experts.

I'm playing around with a GTX 970 and I've been overclocking it to 1500Mhz. I was thinking if I can increase the voltage to push a little bit more, but I've never messed around with the voltages.

Will I damage the card by increasing it to +12.5mV?

This is what shows in NVidia Inspector.

 

[gdmonx]

whats the VC max temp? i think its risky by now you have a good overclock why would you need more is it for gaming or what?

 

[techgeek]

This issue with overclocking Maxwell and Pascal (and to some extent Kepler) is Turbo Boost. Clockspeeds are relatively fluid for these architectures. Turbo Boost will raise and lower the clockspeed based on the current temperature and power draw (TDP). Quite often with Maxwell the limiting factor is TDP because they run fairly cool (with custom cooling) so they don't hit the temperature limit. The TDP limit on the other can only be raised an additional 25%. Once this limit is hit, Turbo Boost will step in and throttle the clockspeed to keep it within the TDP limit.

So what this means is that overclockers often find that they will hit a wall in overclocking and raising the voltage can often have a detrimental affect since raising the voltage will cause the TDP to go up which in turn will cause Turbo Boost to kick in sooner.

However there is a way to try to circumnavigate Turbo Boost explained at this link:

Disable Boost and "Bake-In" Max Game Stable Clocks for Maxwell

A word of caution, this requires modifying and flashing your vBIOS, so any damage you do to your card as a result of following these instructions is on you.