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GTX 970 safe OC voltage ?

Gripen90

Gripen90

Gripen90

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I am OC'ing my MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G and Gainward GTX 970 cards and I want to get the most out of them

Right now I have my MSI's running 1114@1300MHz core and 1753@1903MHz Ram. Powertarget is set to max th 110%. Max boost core 1502MHz.

The Gainward's are running 1051@1231Mhz core and and 1753@19003MHz Ram. Powertarget is set to the max 106%. Max boost core 1420MHz.

How much Voltage is safe for them to give ? The Voltage slider in MSI Afterburner maxes out at +87mV. It that safe to give both my MSI and Gainward cards ?

Some times on the MSI's it get the message than signal was lost to the GPU and has been reconnected. When this happens my OC settings return to stock. Happens mostly when Unigine Heaven 4.0 finishes a benchmark run.
Will increasing the Voltage help on this to get it stable ?
 
I doubt Nvidia would let you increase the volts enough to actually hurt the card in the long run.

Also
Some times on the MSI's it get the message than signal was lost to the GPU and has been reconnected.
Click to expand...

Sounds like something some 290s will do if overvolted too much, lowering refresh rate on your monitor or the resolution helps that when i benchmark my cards. Maybe see if Maxwell does the same?
 
Rangerjr1 said:
Sounds like something some 290s will do if overvolted too much, lowering refresh rate on your monitor or the resolution helps that when i benchmark my cards. Maybe see if Maxwell does the same?
Click to expand...

No Maxwell does not have that problem, max htz all the way when benching.
 
So I'll just crank the voltage up to the max so they'll have more juice to live off and maintain a stable boost clock ?
 
Gripen90 said:
I am OC'ing my MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G and Gainward GTX 970 cards and I want to get the most out of them

Right now I have my MSI's running 1114@1300MHz core and 1753@1903MHz Ram. Powertarget is set to max th 110%. Max boost core 1502MHz.

The Gainward's are running 1051@1231Mhz core and and 1753@19003MHz Ram. Powertarget is set to the max 106%. Max boost core 1420MHz.

How much Voltage is safe for them to give ? The Voltage slider in MSI Afterburner maxes out at +87mV. It that safe to give both my MSI and Gainward cards ?

Some times on the MSI's it get the message than signal was lost to the GPU and has been reconnected. When this happens my OC settings return to stock. Happens mostly when Unigine Heaven 4.0 finishes a benchmark run.
Will increasing the Voltage help on this to get it stable ?
Click to expand...

I found with my 980s on air that it was difficult to give them the full +87mV as they would very quickly get to hot and crash. They would also produce a lot of artifacts as well.

Once I fitted waterblocks things improved a great deal when benching.
 
Kaapstad said:
I found with my 980s on air that it was difficult to give them the full +87mV as they would very quickly get to hot and crash. They would also produce a lot of artifacts as well.

Once I fitted waterblocks things improved a great deal when benching.
Click to expand...

The cards would overheat on air with +87mV? Even with fans at 100%? And i thought the cards dont scale well with lower temps like GK110
 
Rangerjr1 said:
The cards would overheat on air with +87mV? Even with fans at 100%? And i thought the cards dont scale well with lower temps like GK110
Click to expand...

The coolers on the reference 980s are total crap when you use them 4 up. On air you are lucky if you can do one lap of Heaven 4 with overclocking.

The cooler may look like the Titans but it is very different. With 4 Titans on air you can run them all day on the Heaven 4 bench.
 
Kaapstad said:
The coolers on the reference 980s are total crap when you use them 4 up. On air you are lucky if you can do one lap of Heaven 4 with overclocking.

The cooler may look like the Titans but it is very different. With 4 Titans on air you can run them all day on the Heaven 4 bench.
Click to expand...

Eh, lol had no idea the coolers were crap on 980s.
 
Rangerjr1 said:
Eh, lol had no idea the coolers were crap on 980s.
Click to expand...

They are ok 1, 2 or 3 up but 4 forget it.

It is quite an eye opener when you see a Maxwell GPU go past 91c, fortunately it does not last long as the cards will crash very quickly.
 
Last edited:
Kaapstad said:
They are ok 1, 2 or 3 up but 4 forget it.

It is quite an eye opener when you see a Maxwell GPU go past 91c, fortunately it does not last long as the cards will crash very quickly.
Click to expand...

Yea I had 3x MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G with TwinFrozr V cooler running 3-way SLi in my PC yesterday. After one Unigine Heaven 4.0 the top card hit 91°c, middle 85°c, bottome 69°c. Got so hot the screen blanked out for 2 sec for the Mhz to reduce and gained signal again just to cool the upper GPU.
Went back to my 3x Gainward 970 leafblowers again and temps were fine.
Definetely not run 3 way SLi with anything else than radial style blower when on air.

Top the topic. So your advice would be to keep the Voltage alone ?
 
Gripen90 said:
Yea I had 3x MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G with TwinFrozr V cooler running 3-way SLi in my PC yesterday. After one Unigine Heaven 4.0 the top card hit 91°c, middle 85°c, bottome 69°c. Got so hot the screen blanked out for 2 sec for the Mhz to reduce and gained signal again just to cool the upper GPU.
Went back to my 3x Gainward 970 leafblowers again and temps were fine.
Definetely not run 3 way SLi with anything else than radial style blower when on air.

Top the topic. So your advice would be to keep the Voltage alone ?
Click to expand...

Id say as long as you can keep your stuff cool that voltage increase wouldnt hurt anything at all.
 
You cant exceed 1.250 volts anyway without a HW mod/flashing a custom bios.No reason not to see if +87mv gets you better clocks stable.

FWIW my MSI gained nothing with extra voltage ,i cant seem to get any gains from increasing from stock,except an 30 odd mhz from the boost function.

I had heaven crash at the end of run a few times,dialing back the memory a little got me stability.
 
Gripen90 said:
Yea I had 3x MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G with TwinFrozr V cooler running 3-way SLi in my PC yesterday. After one Unigine Heaven 4.0 the top card hit 91°c, middle 85°c, bottome 69°c. Got so hot the screen blanked out for 2 sec for the Mhz to reduce and gained signal again just to cool the upper GPU.
Went back to my 3x Gainward 970 leafblowers again and temps were fine.
Definetely not run 3 way SLi with anything else than radial style blower when on air.

Top the topic. So your advice would be to keep the Voltage alone ?
Click to expand...

With 3 cards for gaming I would just run them with stock voltage as they are plenty fast enough already.

I never use extra voltage on any of my cards for gaming for the same reason above.

What I did find with Maxwell cards on air for benching was it was better to use something like +50mv instead of the max available as this did not get the cards as hot allowing them to clock higher.
 
+87 is fine on the 970, won't hurt it in the slightest. You'll still be limited by actual power delivery to the card however.
 
I'm on an EVGA SC 970. It can hold the max volts (+37) that afterburners allows. My problem is the core/mem overclock isn't good. I'm **** at it tbh.

When the OC is unstable the driver crashes which causes the blank screen and reset of the OC. It doesn't display in the benching program until you close it and open it again.

My card has not gone over 75C. Most stable OC I have got is 50core and 250ram. Even then it crashes after a 4 hour + gaming sesh. Still the temps don't go over 75C tbh not seen them get past 70C while gaming.
 
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