How far can HD7970 goes?

[deFiniLoGy]

Hi all,

I am quite a newbie to overclocking actually, so I think I might ask a few questions here before I start messing up with my system

My Spec:
Asus M5E mobo
i7-3770K OC to 4.5G
Dominator Platinum 4x4Gb 1866M @ 1600M
Sapphire HD7970 Vapor-X 3Gb 1050/1500
Corsair 80+ Bronze 700W
Corsair H100i

How far can this GPU go actually?
And how should I test the stability of the system?
Or should I just try out benchmark of various games etc?
And do I have enough power of OCing the GPU as well as setting the RAMs @ 1866M?

Thanks!!

 

[Dom86]

It's all down to the silicon lottery in all honesty.
Heaven benchmark and 3d mark are a good start with stability, chucking in a few in-game benchmarks would be good to.
Yeah you should be alrite with that psu.

 

[deFiniLoGy]

I've tried pushing it to 1120/1600, should I take it further?
One question as well, even with that clock speed, for 3D Mark 11 the card still only score 9000, is it because I am running it on w8 pro?

 

[kissenger]

A decent OC would be 1125/1575 at stock vaults. If you can get it to 1200/1700 at reasonable volts you've done very well. However, based on my experience the memory will really start to heat up past 1600 so you probably don't want to push it too far past that.

 

[breadturbo]

I managed 1150 on stock volts (1.185 on mine), i had to go up to 1.194 for 1200mhz, and then 1.2v for 1250, i've only tweaked the ram a little bit like you to 1600mhz at stock volts.
As Dom has said above though, it's a lottery as to whether you get a decent clocker.

For ensuring your system is stable I use Heaven benchmark for scores and furmark for stress tests, then IBT for cpu.
Your psu is fine

 

[Drangueos]

1.2V for 1250 is really nice... i had one 7970 that could to that... I really miss it