Some help with a 980 Classified

[trawetSluaP]

Right, I have purchased a 980 Classified and am chuffed with it. EVGA seems to have sorted out the issues with the ACX I had and the card is both quiet and powerful!

I'd like a little help with regards to overclocking it.

Firstly I wanna to check my card is ok. Sometimes when I push an oc too far and am testing whether it be Heaven or in game (I'm using Far Cry 4 and Borderlands: TPS) I'll get a crash to desktop with the application causing the crash displaying a white screen but the driver crash message doesn't pop up. Is this normal/ok behaviour for the card? Also when I'm playing Borderlands the card only runs at it's base clock of 1291 regardless of oc, is this normal also or do I have a faulty card?

Secondly I'm having some issues understanding the oc that I'm doing. My max stable oc for benching with fans at 100% is as follows:
Core Voltage: +50 (For a max readout of 1.256v in Afterburner)
Power Limit: 110% (Never seen it go beyond 95% but it's there should the card need it)
Core Clock: +117. That's Base: 1408, Boost: 1510, Final Boost: 1572.
Memory Clock: +775. That's 8554 effective.

This oc passed through Heaven loops and a 3DMark run. However when I'm gaming I don't want to have the fans running at 100% all the time so I have a more conservative oc for gaming. My issue is that although it runs through Heaven and 3DMark without issue it keeps crashing in game with a lower oc even though the games aren't as demanding as the benchmarks. Is it a case of the oc just being unstable or am I choosing the wrong games to test it with?

I attempted to make a game stable oc at +91 on the core and +625 on the memory, but this crashed. I tried resetting the memory to 0 and applied +87 to the voltage and +65 to the core and still Borderlands crashes. At this point I'm really disappointed that I can't seem to add even a small oc to the card. I realise it's already pushed hard from factory but I'm surprised I can bench at such high speeds but not get them stable in game.

I'm relatively new to oc'ing and want to better understand where I'm going wrong if it's user error, or could it be an issue with the card? Or it's simply not a great chip? Any help will be appreciated.

 

[facboy]

this is going to be a bit of an essay:

instability due to an o/c (or faulty hardware) can manifest in many different ways. i know some people make the mistake of thinking that it will always fail with a driver crash, or a hard lock, or artifacts and if it doesn't fail the way they expect they assume, 'my card is stable, it's something else'. bottom line, if it crashes, artifacts, hard locks, whatever, and it goes away when you downclock, then your o/c is unstable.

re: benchmarks vs games, short version, if your card is crashing in borderlands and this goes away when you reduce your o/c (or run it stock), your o/c is unstable. i keep posting about this, gpu boost 2.0 makes it very hard to test an overclock. whether it's a bug or by design, the current drivers do not take a core offset (whether applied through bios or through software) into account when calculating the voltage for a given bin (and thus clock speed).

as an example, my g1 runs 1228 base clock and 1329 boost at stock (in reality it will boost to 1366 at stock, with absolutely no changes to anything in afterburner). at the base bin of 1228 it uses 1.062v, at the top bin of 1366 it uses 1.218v. depending on load it can vary the clock speed and voltage between these two bins (and in fact below the base clock too). if i add a core offset of +50 then all this does is change the clock speed of each bin, it does not change the voltage. this means that now the base bin still uses 1.068v, but it tries to run at 1278, and the top bin uses 1.218v, but tries to run at 1416. it will still vary the clock speed and voltage depending on load. just remember that with the core offset, you're changing the clock that it uses for every voltage bin.

now if you think about o/cing on older cards, what do you do? you start at stock voltage, and you increase the core until you hit instability. so at stock voltage, you can hit clock X. now you add a bit of voltage, and maybe you can go higher than X, or maybe you can't. you add a bit more again, you might gain a bit more again. remember though that every chip is different, eg your mates card does 1100 at stock voltage but yours only does 1025. you add 0.005v and now your card will do 1150 but his will still only do 1100. now you add another 0.005v and yours will do 1225 but now his will only do 1175. each card is different and each card's limits are different at different voltages.

so gpu boost 2 makes this a whole lot harder because instead of just testing one voltage and seeing what the limit is and calling it a day, to find out true stability you need to check every voltage bin and see if your card can run at that core offset with that voltage. a bin is also not a fixed voltage, it is a range of voltages and the card can vary it in roughly 0.006v increments.

what does this mean? it means that on your classy you have run a load of benchmarks with no crashes and this tells you that it is most likely stable at 1572mhz when it's using 1.256v. what you haven't done is run a load of other stuff that tells you that eg it's stable at 1450mhz using only 1.15v, or even that it's stable at 1408mhz at 1.081v (made up numbers). borderlands is an old game, are you running it with a frame limiter? if so you'll probably find that the card is running close to it's base clock, and you've discovered that it can't run +65 base clock at the base bin voltage. remember the additional voltage you've added only opens up additional higher boost bins, it does not add voltage to the 'existing' bins. also note that the card will down-volt pretty aggressively below its top boost bin, ie on my card G1 as I said the top bin voltage is 1.218v. i can add additional voltage and this opens up only one more boost bin and it runs at 1.243v, so another 0.025mv! the bin immediately below the 1.218v is 1.193v, so 0.025mv less, and then all the way down to 10 boost bins lower at 1228, the voltage only drops another 0.125 or so to 1.068 or about 0.0125v per bin. the top two bins add twice as much voltage per bin as the other bins, so they tend to have more headroom - you're probably going to be able to support a higher core offset in the top boost bins because they have proportionately more voltage than the bins immediately below them.

i think a lot of people are only running benchmarks and demanding games (and let's face it, that is the target of these cards). if/when they run less-demanding stuff, with a frame limiter, you'll find that a lot of these super-high overclocks are actually going to be unstable in the lower bins, and they will claim that it can't be their overclock because it runs firestrike for hours without crashing, and they will be wrong.

what can you do about it? wait and see if nvidia do something about it (unlikely in the short/medium term, this issue has existed since the 780s i believe), run the card at stock, or run a custom bios. you have a classy, that's really what it's all about anyway! check out overclock.net, i believe there are some custom classified bios's on there already. or download maxwell bios editor and make your own. you basically need to account for your core offset by slightly boosting the voltages in the bins where you are having instability.

or run the card at stock, it's damn fast already .

 

[trawetSluaP]

I appreciate all the info, very informative!

Ultimately I'll be using the card at stock based on my experiences thus far, and with this in mind I've half a mind to send the 980 back and go for SLI 970's purely because the Classified as wasted at stock...

 

[facboy]

imo the bios modding is pretty easy and also pretty safe, personally i would avoid the various modded ones available and just use maxwell bios editor to slightly tweak the voltage table in the lower bins. ultimately if you don't increase the max voltage to the card (in the higher bins) then i doubt much can go wrong.

a classy is pretty much built for tweaking, on one level if you don't want to do that then i agree it doesn't make much sense. on the other hand, at stock it's one of the fastest cards out there so there is that. if i was buying today i'd be sorely tempted by the galax hof, waiting to see reviews - it could be a damp squib like the zotac amp extreme.

 

[trawetSluaP]

imo the bios modding is pretty easy and also pretty safe, personally i would avoid the various modded ones available and just use maxwell bios editor to slightly tweak the voltage table in the lower bins. ultimately if you don't increase the max voltage to the card (in the higher bins) then i doubt much can go wrong.

a classy is pretty much built for tweaking, on one level if you don't want to do that then i agree it doesn't make much sense. on the other hand, at stock it's one of the fastest cards out there so there is that. if i was buying today i'd be sorely tempted by the galax hof, waiting to see reviews - it could be a damp squib like the zotac amp extreme.

I'm incredibly torn on what to do!

 

[facboy]

well...i prefer a single gpu to sli. for the newest games you're potentially waiting on nvidia to sort out a profile that scales properly for sli. not always but it happens.

with the 9xx series there is still a bug in sli where one of the cards undervolts and this can cause instability too. people have fixed it themselves with, guess what, a custom bios .

afaik evga are pretty lenient with their warranty, generally if you don't physically damage the card then they will honour it - hopefully someone from oc can chime in. if you did use a custom bios you would need to put the stock one back on if you did have to rma the card. bear in mind that if you mod the bios to allow you to massively overvolt the gpu and you fried it that would count as physical damage!

doesn't help your situation, but imo the classy is not worth the extra money if you are not going extreme. the few oc'ing results on the 980 that i've seen don't show significantly better overclocks than any other card (ref or otherwise) at stock or near stock voltages. i think to get the benefit at the top end you really need to be willing to tweak and modify a lot, if you just want to plug it in and game on it i think it's wasted.

that said, at stock it is one of the fastest factory oc'd cards out there, only beaten narrowly by the hof. as i've mentioned with gpu boost 2.0 it is much harder to maintain stability with an overclock and i can tell you for a fact that unlike in the past it is by no means likely that eg a reference card could run with an equivalent core offset in all its voltage bins without bios mods.

ultimately, if you're not comfortable with bios mods then it is even more of a crap-shoot whether you are going to get a 9xx that overclocks significantly and remains 24/7 stable under all loads and all conditions (by which i mean the different voltage bins). imo this is why the factory overclocks seem so conservative compared to the results you see posted on internet forums which only test stability under peak load in the top voltage bin. if you want to just run at stock then decided how much you are willing to pay to get a guaranteed factory overclock. fwiw, a 1572 24/7 clock is very good especially at 1.256v, a lot of people would be very happy with that, even if they had to tweak a couple of the lower voltage bins. to be honest all the forums are full of n00bs flashing modified bios with no idea what is in them or what they do, imo if you're going to do it, read around a bit and educate yourself, make small changes and test. as you know the classy is a very popular target for tweakers so there should be lots of expert knowledge out there in time.

also consider whether you can return the classy at no cost to yourself, if you are in the UK bear in mind that the law has changed recently and DSR has been replaced by CCR. the retailer can (not will) charge a restocking fee if you have changed your mind after using the product.

 

[EVGAdominik]

Hi, in synthetic benchmarks you can usually reach a higher clock then in games, the load games produce might be less but it do have more spikes and for this it is important that the overclock is stable. Generally I would suggest to go to the King Pin forums, there you will find a Over Voltage Tool, to put some more volts on the card, on air you can normally go up to 1.3 - 1.35 without heat issues. In those forums you will also find a tweaked BIOS with higher power target. As you mentioned you are running at 110% this do sound like you are running on the standard BIOS, the card do have a tripple BIOS support, on the LN2 BIOS you should be able to access 120% Power target and the modded BIOSes available do have a even higher target. If you flash a third party BIOS on the card please make sure you flash this on chip 2 or 3 then you can still access the card with chip 1 in case there is any issue. The BIOS switch is located next to the power connectors. With higher voltage and higher power target the card should also get a bit higher clocks.... Generally I would also suggest to put some high quality thermal paste on the card, the one that is used is already a good one but better one can help to gets temps down. The cards fans are semi passive, mean they do not spin till the card hit 60 degree, for this card I would suggest to set up a custom fan profile and let the card already spin like 20% at 40 degree and then increase. This will help you specially in gaming to keep the card cool without running 100% fanspeed and reach higher clocks.

 

[trawetSluaP]

Ok, thanks for your help guys.

Not to keen on the idea of messing about with BIOS' and the like...

Think I might send the card back and get a couple of 970s...

EDIT: Sod it, I bought and paid for the best 980 available and I'm gonna get my monies worth! Thanks again for all your help!

 

[facboy]

fyi, i've found that running heaven at basic settings but upping the res to 1600x900 and turning vsync on gives gpu boost 2.0 a decent workout. it wanders around between 980 and 1500 on my card, covering lots of points in between.