MSI Lightning GTX 680 - O/C advice

[zoobee]

Hi guys,

I bought and built myself this a couple of years ago and i never really thought about OC GPU or CPU, I know i need MSI Afterburner for the Card and have pondered tweaking, but I dont want to blow up my card, I dont want to risk a small bonus in playing BF4 for my card to then give up, I cant afford it lol. So is it even worth doing anything?

The GPU gets hot compared to the CPU, it hits about 72oc on 99% load playing BF4 and the fan does not seem to ever appear loaded, max 1500RPM i monitored, is that normal?
I did use the afterburner to try once the Fan speed, took it up to 50% and i really heard it! When its on auto it never seems to kick in, certainly never heard it at 50% or more.

any tips or do or don'ts welcome, thanks a lot, ;p


i5 4670k 3.40Ghz
GTX 680 Lighting MSI 2gb
Win10 64bit
Z87 oc Gigabyte
8 Gb RAM
Antec 750 PSU
CNPS11x CPU cooler (CPU never goes about 46oc)

 

[PieEater]

The max operating temperature of the 680 is 98c but you'd want to keep it under 80c when overclocking. The Lightning cards are built with high end components and are designed to be overclocked so there is little chance of you blowing it up. Given that your temperatures are well under control and your cooler isn't even breaking a sweat I'd say you ought to be giving it a go.

If you wanted to play it totally safe at least initially then don't unlock voltage control in Afterburner but you might want to do so later once you've got the hang of what you're doing as this will let you reach the full potential of the card. I would set the cards fans to 100% whilst you are finding your maximum overclock after which you can set it back to Auto and check the temperatures are still being kept under 80c or create a manual fan profile to keep the card within safe temperatures / acceptable noise levels.

Start with the core clocks and test until you get stability problems (Unigene Heaven is as good a stability test as any) then back off a notch and up the memory clocks until you start getting artefacts or strange glitches and back off a notch.

According to this article you could expect to see ~9% performance increase without unlocking voltage control and ~15% increase with voltage unlocked.

This video may help you.