Completely stuck

[caNoNJJ]

Hey guys, I recently received my EVGA GTX 970 FTW+ ACX 2.0 card.

Now before I continue, I just want to say I know the card is already OC'd out the box and that it's really good still for 1080p 60fps gaming but I would still like to push it further.

The issue that I am having is, my OC's seems completely random in terms of stability and what triggers crashes. For example, when I first got the card I could not go above +100 on the core clock without instantly crashing, yet now I can get to +140 on Unigine heaven and valley benchmarks, completely stable, no artifacts. Yet as soon as I load Fire Strike Extreme, I crash automatically and keep crashing until I lowered the core clock to like +90.

Then, I restarted my pc and rose the core clock to +130, entered Fire Strike Extreme, unigine heaven and valley and it was completely stable again.

Is there a cause for this? Is it my drivers, they are up to date.

For the record, when I insta-crash I always get a brown screen, it's never a black screen unless my drivers crash.

Thanks!

EDIT: I forgot to add I have a aggressive fan curve going, to ensure the card stays below 70 degrees even after a couple hours use. Also, I have tried both EVGA PrecisionX and MSI Afterburner.

 

[Disco_P]

Overclocking a graphics card with GPU boost 2.0 is pure unadulterated aids. Along with general stability issues you have to worry about the power limit, voltage limit, temp limit, OV limit and utilisation limit. Super fun.

An unstable overclock won't crash in the exact place every time, the length they can go without crashing varies massively. When I was doing stupid volts Unigine Valley benchmarks I would sometimes crash right at the start, sometimes make about 80% and did eventually make it all the way through. I've found valley and heaven to be much less crash prone than other things (don't know about fire strike as I don't use 3Dmark software).

For Kepler there is loads of non boost bioses floating around, not sure about maxwell though.

 

[PieEater]

From personal experience benchmark utilities give a rough indication of stability but it is only by using the card for the games you want to play that you will know for sure. For instance I was stable in Heaven at a high overclock but had to knock this down when playing one game due to stability issues and then knock it down again for another game that was evidently even more demanding on the card.

I appreciate this does not help with your overclocking issue but I wouldn't put a huge amount of time into achieving stability in a benchmark app you really want to be making sure that your card is game stable.

 

[caNoNJJ]

Thanks guys, yeah I've decided to OC using games, right now I have been stable at +100 +350, think I could maybe push the memory some more but I prefer to stay completely stable.

Only game I sometimes crash in is CS:GO, but because it's an old game I can sort of see why.