I want to overclock my EVGA 980Ti (tried before but broke the gpu) need help

Samhfx

Samhfx

Samhfx

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Long story short I bought the EVGA 980Ti about 2 years ago.

2 weeks ago I decided after 2 years of not thinking about overclocking it I would give it a go. I done a ton of research and took the slowest and most efficient way possible. I was adding 10+ on the core clock after every successful benchmark playthrough. After about 100+ and hours of testing my PC just shut down and wouldn't turn on with the GPU plugged in.

When the GPU died I went through the process of getting a new GPU via RMA. It came today.


I attempted to overclock again and now i'm scared.

I managed to get +120 core clock but benchmark froze. went to +115 everything was running fine.

i put +250 on mem clock and within 30-60 seconds in the benchmark monitor went black and the lights on my gpu went off and I had a heart attack because thats what happened to my old GPU. I had to do a hard restart by holding button on my tower and praise the lord my PC turned on with the GPU plugged in.

Now I'm scared to touch anything lol.

any ideas?
 
Well in all my years i have never killed a gpu or cpu and i have been extreme many years ago with overclocking
 
wedrum said:
Well in all my years i have never killed a gpu or cpu and i have been extreme many years ago with overclocking
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Is it normal during a benchmark whilst changing the mem clock for monitor to go black and pc still runs but gpu lights are off. only way to fix that is to hard restart by pushing power button on tower?
 
Yeh it's normal..
Also in my experience GPU overclocking is a bit of a waste of time ... Instability and an overclock that looks good on paper doesn't really translate well into more Fps in games for the effort it takes.
You could try under volting for less fan noise /heat but if you want more fps you're better off just getting a better card assuming the card is the bottle neck..
 
That might be the case now with the modern cards but with older cards you could get significant gains from an overclock. At stock one of my 980tis only does 1200mhz, I get quite a decent FPS boot once overclocked.

I think your first GPU must have been faulty, either that or you have a faulty PSU, it’s perfectly normal for crashes and freezes when over clocking the gpu.

Do you have a decent power supply Sam?
 
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While potentially much scarier, maxwell needs tweakery at vbios level before overclocking starts to make much sense. Boost 2.0 is the enemy of max overclocks.

Less voltage/heat = higher core and mem clocks.
 
Bluntwrapped said:
While potentially much scarier, maxwell needs tweakery at vbios level before overclocking starts to make much sense. Boost 2.0 is the enemy of max overclocks.

Less voltage/heat = higher core and mem clocks.
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Pascal even moreso. Without changing the BIOS I found it very hard to really improve performance under water cooling. Assumed I could just max a load of things out but GPU Boost is already doing that!
 
It's a shame there hasn't been a breakthrough in Pascal vbios modding. I have a waterblock for my 1080 FTW but I haven't tried it. I'm not convinced it's going to do much without a decent bios to play with.
 
Bluntwrapped said:
While potentially much scarier, maxwell needs tweakery at vbios level before overclocking starts to make much sense. Boost 2.0 is the enemy of max overclocks.

Less voltage/heat = higher core and mem clocks.
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Yeah i dunno why they lock down them power limits so much in the bios, i guess its so they can say their cards are really efficient. It does save a lot of power but also restricts the overclocking a fair bit.
 
BluD said:
Yeah i dunno why they lock down them power limits so much in the bios, i guess its so they can say their cards are really efficient. It does save a lot of power but also restricts the overclocking a fair bit.
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Yeah it’s just so generalised when each and every card behaves differently. The nature of balancing volts/power/temperature is expected but not at the expense of throttling performance before any of these become an issue.
 
Bluntwrapped said:
Yeah it’s just so generalised when each and every card behaves differently. The nature of balancing volts/power/temperature is expected but not at the expense of throttling performance before any of these become an issue.
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That's pretty much what GPU Boost 3.0 is doing though, it's pushing either voltage or clock up to maximise performance. It's more granular so it's able to compensate around the limiting factors more from card to card.

i.e. earlier GPU boost dynamically adjusted clock speeds so clock speeds were in the card's/driver's control. We just adjusted base clock mostly. And then newer GPU Boost has taken control of the voltage too. Most factors in the equation are now out of our hands as the driver "does the overclocking for us" for better or worse...

Useful graphs and explanations here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/15
 
LuckyBenski said:
That's pretty much what GPU Boost 3.0 is doing though, it's pushing either voltage or clock up to maximise performance. It's more granular so it's able to compensate around the limiting factors more from card to card.

i.e. earlier GPU boost dynamically adjusted clock speeds so clock speeds were in the card's/driver's control. We just adjusted base clock mostly. And then newer GPU Boost has taken control of the voltage too. Most factors in the equation are now out of our hands as the driver "does the overclocking for us" for better or worse...

Useful graphs and explanations here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/15
Click to expand...

The most exciting thing you can do with a stock bios now is undervolt each boost bin and make the card even more efficient. In the case of the 1080 pretty much all of them will do 11GHz mem, but only a few manufacturers provide newer 11GHz bios.

I guess the OCD in me wants to test and permanently flash the card with what it needs and when it need it. Like my 980 I’d love to not have to rely on afterburner or similar to make changes once I’ve found stability at either end.

It would be interesting to see if the bios is more sensitive to temperature change than it needs to be, especially if it’s under custom water.
 
I find on my laptop that upping the clocks does overclock my GTX1070, as the clocks are rather limited in a laptop, however I frequently get 1800-2000Mhz when using overclocking. It is up and down dependent on temperature though. I feel I get a few frames more but nothing that's like wow.


Not sure how overclocking can damage a card, if the clocks are unstable usually the drivers reset the card, or the computer reboots, no physical damage unless vmoding?
 
willhub said:
I find on my laptop that upping the clocks does overclock my GTX1070, as the clocks are rather limited in a laptop, however I frequently get 1800-2000Mhz when using overclocking. It is up and down dependent on temperature though. I feel I get a few frames more but nothing that's like wow.


Not sure how overclocking can damage a card, if the clocks are unstable usually the drivers reset the card, or the computer reboots, no physical damage unless vmoding?
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Yep overclocking is now so restricted it’s incredibly difficult/impossible to cause any damage from it. The options you have available to you is a bit like ‘my first GPU’ or an idiots guide to overclocking. I guess this works well for many and minimising manufacturer returns but not so much for the enthusiast user who likes to tweak things.

My card has a dual bios switch which would be a nice feature, if it wasn’t made pointless by the lack of options available.
 
Im guessing theres no pascal editor out yet so you have to do it manually still atm?

edit: Nvm i just went and read up on it, JoeDirt and others trying havent figured out how to get around the checks in NVflash for pascal so no flashing custom bioses for now. Maybe that will force more people into physical mods again, i kinda miss them days when mods were potentiometers and resistors rather than a bios change. Having a physical dial to turn always feels better than changing a digit :)
 
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