[SOLVED] Would like to overclock GTX 650 Ti BOOST but am not sure how to go about it

[ragnarok0274]

I'm venturing into the world of CPU and GPU overclocking as I've had some free time lately (school is winding down). I have 2 EVGA GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB Superclocked Editions.
My first attempt did not go very far - I was only able to get +15 MHz on the core and +500 MHz on VRAM, using 1080p Medium Superposition as my test. I feel I could go farther with a higher power limit (the stock VBIOS is limited to 110% power limit), and temps aren't an issue - under F@H and Superposition temps were max 85C on the top card, and 80C on the bottom card with the side panel on (it has a 190mm fan on the side). They're both blower coolers.

Apparently you can mod and then flash a custom VBIOS that can change power and thermal limits, but I'm not sure how I would go about doing this or if it is advised. I'm not going to be able to buy a new card anytime soon, and I'd like to get every ounce of performance I can out of these.

Note that I'm not running SLI. My B350-F Gaming does not support SLI.

Does anyone have any advice on if I should try VBIOS modding+flashing or not, what I should use to test my overclocks, and anything else? I have already repasted these cards with MX-4.

 

[Johnwmel]

how to overclock gtx 650 ti boost
https://cutt.ly/DblFTGs

 

[BFG-9000]

You'll need a few tools to start, including GPU-Z to save the BIOS (optional if you prefer commandline NVFlash instead to do this), Joe Dirt's NVFlash_Certs_Bypassed_v5.287 and KeplerBiosTweaker v1.27, both from techpowerup.

Save the vBIOS from your card, and make a backup copy before modding. It's all too easy to accidentally hit save instead of save as...

Open it with KeplerBiosTweaker and in the Voltage Table tab just set any maximum voltage of P00 to 1187.5mV. Do not exceed this as modern drivers will refuse to run the card if set any higher and just give you code 43 (apparently this was changed because people were blowing up their reference 780Ti cards at 1212mV max due to under-speced power circuitry, a perennial nVidia problem. So you'll just have to ignore any overclocking numbers from 5+ years ago)
Under Power Table you can adjust the maximum 110% power limit to whatever you'd like up to 136% (it's 110w TDP @ stock so you have 40w to play with). Given the severe voltage limitation above it's not going to matter too much. You can also adjust the fan speeds and temperatures for them, then save the BIOS.

Flash the modified BIOS with an administrator command prompt (no need to disable GPU in device manager because this is now automatically done for you in newer nvflash):
nvflash -6 modBIOSname.rom
The reason you need the modified NVFlash is because newer than 5.142 from 2013 checks for an unmodified BIOS. The modified NVFlash will not flash an original BIOS so if you ever want to do that you'll need the official NVFlash to do it.

You will still need to use software to overclock your card for now, because that's how to determine the stable clocks at the new maximum voltage. I strongly suggest not going over 100% power limit when doing this, because more than this is not available with vBIOS-only overclocking (but feel free if you are happy to always use software overclocking).

Once you have determined stable clocks @ 100% then they can be saved to the vBIOS if you like and flashed. Note that techpowerup has a lot of vBIOSes available for download--you can open them for reference to see what settings to try transferring to your BIOS but they aren't intended for flashing your card with (for example if they don't recognize your vRAM then you'll have a shiny new brick)

The 650Ti has boost, so you'll need to use GPU-Z to see what frequencies the GPU actually runs at in games. You wouldn't believe the number of people who think their "1500MHz" overclock is stable because it never crashes, when in reality it's because they never reach 1500MHz

 

[ragnarok0274]

-snip-

Does this look right?
Here is the original VBIOS file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZK4H5UY1c6COKOr43XCL7iQghv0dOuPQ/view?usp=sharing
And here is the modified VBIOS file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rkO4kHxvmCJiA7xTgtIe4PXEbtnD9imd/view?usp=sharing
I modified the fan settings to say 0 to 100% (it was originally 30 to 74% which is stupid IMO), changed the voltage settings to 1187.5, but I'm a bit confused under the boost table tab. Do I only have to change the last set or all of them?

Also, I downloaded the VBIOS for both of my cards, used HxD to compare the two files, and they're identical. Does that mean the VBIOS will be valid for both cards or will I have to edit each one individually?

 

[BFG-9000]

I wouldn't change a fan that's not designed to be stopped to 0%. Most likely there is some hardwired minimum that it will spin at anyway, but it could possibly just keep twitching and damage the fan, or else panic when the rpm drops too low and annoyingly ramp it up to 100% then stop again in an endless loop.

In the power table, only the last one is for total board power, which is what is read by overclocking software. On the boost table you are supposed to set your desired maximum boost clock (the boost limit on the Common tab) at clock 33 because given your present voltage table it can never go above that as it would then exceed 1187.5mV (clock 44 would thus be 1437.5 if you are shooting for max boost of 1293.5).

If the cards are identical then it's not surprising they have the same BIOS and you can flash the same modified one to each. You can either insert each into the first PCIe slot to do this or use
nvflash --list
to see what index numbers the cards have been assigned, then
nvflash --index=x modBIOSname.rom
to flash to a specific card, where x is the index number

 

[ragnarok0274]

Alright, I've flashed both cards. The changes I added in the VBIOS are there.
Thank you for your help!

 

[ragnarok0274]

Slight update:
I managed to get +60 core (to 1230 MHz) and +500 memory (to 3510 MHz) with the increased voltage. Before, I could get max +15.

Power consumption didn't go above 130W while running Superposition 1080p medium (because higher than that requires more VRAM that I don't have) and max temps were 76C.