GTX 680 Overclocking/Power Usage issues

[The Seventh One]

Hi all, I'm trying to overclock my GTX 680 however I'm encountering a couple of issues when doing so.

When I overclock the offset by 100MHz I get 1185MHz core clock when running Heaven 3.0 which would be correct since the boost is 1085MHz~ by default.

However when I go beyond this lets say 120MHz the core clock starts to fluctuate and not go above roughly 1170MHz.

Upon seeing this I looked at the power usage of the card and I noticed that it wouldn't go over 100% even though I have set the threshold to 132% and I have seen videos of people's power usage go into the 100's so I'm thinking that this might be the problem.

My power supply is an 850W Corsair and I used to power 2 x 6950's in CF. I have 4 6-pin connectors and have tried swapping them around to no avail.

If anyone can give me any insight to what could be causing this brick wall I would be grateful.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Sin_Chase]

There is more to it than the sliders you set.

Temperatures are also taken into consideration with god knows what else in the internal algorithms the Boost features uses.

 

[Nuwidol]

I agree with Sin about temps.

I find with my 680s that they throttle a lot when they're overclocked. try setting the fan to max (85%) & see if you're still seeing the same barrier.

I don't really find the overclocking features for the 600 series to be that good IMO though. I'd much rather a static clock to set. Maybe a custom BIOS could set one...

 

[Rusty0611]

I agree with Sin about temps.

I find with my 680s that they throttle a lot when they're overclocked. try setting the fan to max (85%) & see if you're still seeing the same barrier.

I don't really find the overclocking features for the 600 series to be that good IMO though. I'd much rather a static clock to set. Maybe a custom BIOS could set one...

Yeah. I think the overclocking method is a good concept but I don't feel it works as well as it could do. The thermal throttle is not great as at stock fan speeds it's pretty much guaranteed to get throttled (by 15mhz) but the limit for the throttle is a fair amount under temperatures where it would be considered 'hot' by most enthusiasts.