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Overclocking and gaming?

TAZOO7

TAZOO7

TAZOO7

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Joined
20 Oct 2013
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246
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S.Wales
Hi ladies and gents, just wondering as im a bit old school, and getting long in the tooth, are there any benefits to overclocking these days given how powerful GPU now are, and the resolution most game at, what difference does it make these days, in today's games, in terms of FPS, whilst i have not done extensive testing, but my own findings lead me to believe that upgrading my 970 is the only way to go, as overclocking yields very little results, maybe its because my card is factory overclocked, im not sure, but its not like it use to be back in the day, now i feel most only do it for sport, or for fun, rather than any real world benefits, again i'll stress that im on the wrong side of 46 please take this into consideration before feeding me to the dogs so to speak :)
 
I also have a 970 and overclocking gives me a fairly modest boost.

The main problem for me was that the card seems gimped by voltage and power limits, even with a custom bios.

Overclocking might let you keep a few graphics options on but won't make a unplayable game playable.

I think your right that overclocking the 970 is pointless unless your benchmarking

I'm still happy with my 970 at 1080p, what games are you struggling with that make you want to upgrade?
 
Im playing shadows of mordor at the moment, @ 1440P i think i need to upgrade my power supply from a 400W (gold) though its only drawing 270W max from the wall, when i overclock the card my firestrike score actually drops, albeit not by much, turned some settings down from ultra to high for now, whilst i ponder my next move, im only using a i3 6100 cpu, not sure how bigger part that plays these days, and not sure if i play enough games to justify spending 400 to 600 on a new card, its getting ridiculous price wise.
 
Overclocking helps and it doesn't. Depends on the hardware. Videocard overclocking is tricky. If you do it wrong performance doesn't change or goes down. If done right you can definitely squeeze out extra frames.

CPU overclocking depends on the CPU. If you have a new Intel CPU, overclocking won't do pretty much anything for you in games. If you have an older or inefficient CPU though, like a 2500K or 8350, overclocking can definitely increase your performance.

If you have really old hardware, like Core 2 era stuff, overclocking your CPU and front side bus is absolutely critical to getting decent performance in modern titles.
 
what 970 is it you have?
Ive got the Asus strix oc 970 I do notice an increase in some games when its overclocked but my old gainward 970 wasn't much of an over clocker and it never made much difference.

I think playing @ 1440p though you do need to upgrade from the 970. Im running @ 1080p and on some games I think I could do with more.

My lad wants my 970 as hes still running my old 7950 so Im thinking on getting a 2nd hand 980ti to drop into my system.
 
With Haswell i7s (and later) in particular, there's not much to be gained in games from overclocking.

That said, I have an i7 4790k overclocked to 4.7GHz.
 
jbh110tdi said:
what 970 is it you have?
Ive got the Asus strix oc 970 I do notice an increase in some games when its overclocked but my old gainward 970 wasn't much of an over clocker and it never made much difference.

I think playing @ 1440p though you do need to upgrade from the 970. Im running @ 1080p and on some games I think I could do with more.

My lad wants my 970 as hes still running my old 7950 so Im thinking on getting a 2nd hand 980ti to drop into my system.
Click to expand...


I have the EVGA SCC 970, but i just bought a second hand 980ti now, but have to get a bigger PSU as well

I was going to change the CPU, but after watching youtube bench marks the i3 surprisingly keep up with the best in most games, especially shadow of mordor, but i did order a Z170 as in the other games there was a noticeable difference between the i3 running with 2133 memory and that of one running 2666, so we shall see, should keep me going a while longer :)

my system at this moment is

Intel i3 6100
MSI B150M BAZOOKA Socket 1151
Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 DRAM 2666MHz C16 Memory Kit
Be Quiet Straight Power 400W Fully Wired 80+ Gold Power Supply
some ssd etc
no overclocking
 
TAZOO7 said:
I have the EVGA SCC 970, but i just bought a second hand 980ti now, but have to get a bigger PSU as well

I was going to change the CPU, but after watching youtube bench marks the i3 surprisingly keep up with the best in most games, especially shadow of mordor, but i did order a Z170 as in the other games there was a noticeable difference between the i3 running with 2133 memory and that of one running 2666, so we shall see, should keep me going a while longer :)

my system at this moment is

Intel i3 6100
MSI B150M BAZOOKA Socket 1151
Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 DRAM 2666MHz C16 Memory Kit
Be Quiet Straight Power 400W Fully Wired 80+ Gold Power Supply
some ssd etc
no overclocking
Click to expand...

nice one you should notice a nice difference with the 980ti.

the only time your system should be let down is if the game is reliant on the CPU.

I would would have thought the EVGA SCC 970 would have been a cracking card. always fancied one of them over my Asus one.
 
I overclocked my 970 G1 gaming from the stock boost of ~1300mhz to 1500mhz and the performance gain in most games was around 10fps. Might not seem like much, but its an improvement at virtually no cost as the card was still silent and stayed at less than 70c with 40% fan speed on full load.

There's definitely gains to be had from overclocking, but it'll never replace getting a new GPU. That said, you only really have a handful of choices if upgrading from a 970 such as a 980Ti, 1070 or 1080 (Or the Titans). If you can grab a used 980Ti for less than £300 then that's a good upgrade as you'll be doubling your performance.
 
If you have a good cpu to start with an oc is pretty pointless.

My old 780ti was a good over locker and it did help me run at 1440p.

I haven't bothered overclocking my 1080 and 1070 bar benchmarks as have found small gains in gaming.
 
Personally I gained about 10 FPS in 1080p when I overclocked my 4670k from stock (3.4, turbo 3.8) to 4.2. :)

Edit: 10 FPS gain, not 15.
 
Last edited:
Slightly confused as to whether the OP is referring to overclocking his CPU, or graphics card... I'm guessing the former due to the forum section we're in :)

With you being only on an i3, I wonder if you're not finding yourself CPU bound, which is why overclocking the GPU hasn't helped much.

Best advice: find a monitoring program that'll watch GPU and CPU utilisation during while you game. One of them will be close to 100%, the other probably won't. If the GPU is maxed, overclock it. If the CPU is maxed, consider an i5 instead :)

The balance is going to be game dependant however, so try it out with a few!
 
Well the 980ti did not come off, sadly i was scammed at £250 worse off, the guy is a serial scammer, please read the link and get familiar with the name and other details as you can bet he is on more than one forum.

https://www.avforums.com/threads/evga-980ti-plextor-m6e-m-2-pci-e-512gb.2059670/page-2#post-24305147

Anyway been watching a few youtube bench marks comparing the i3 (2133) vs i3 (2666) vs i5 vs i7 and in most games they were very close FPS and in shadow of mordor there were all the same, ironic as thats the game im into right now.

So with that in mind i went and got a 1070 and a Z170 mobo, nice improvement over the old setup but not out of this world, may upgrade top a i5 or i7, but waiting to see what comes out next, im good for now

In regards to some of the comments above, the gpu runs at 100% on the both cards, the CPU varies but its never maxed out, would loved to have seen how the 970 did on this board but thats sold the night before so no can do.

If someone would like to lend me a i5 or i7 so i can try before i buy, thats would be great :)



all in all im quite happy and impressed by this combo, and it only draws 210W tops from the wall, down 70W from the 970
 
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