Did i get a decent overclock? 970 FTW+

So after putting a kraken g10 and an h55 on my evga 970 FTW+, i finally decided to get to OCing using MSI Afterburner last night. Finished the night off at +12mv, about +220 on the core (highest boost clock i got to was 1623mhz), and +100 on the vram (7.2gbps effective, up from 7). I had put the power limit and thermal limit sliders all the way up. Valley would run without issue. Temps were not an issue either, low 60s if that.

I had also OC'd my CPU (i7-3770k) to 4.6ghz at 1.255v "stable" after about 10-20mins of prime95 small FFT. Temps were about as high as i was comfortable with (mid-70s c).

Firestrike was NOT happy. So many issues, failed runs, unknown errors, etc. Kept lowering the OC on the graphics card, issues persisted. Eventually had to reset bios to start from scratch and remove the OC on the graphics card. Now firestrike would run. Left the CPU OC off, started playing with the GPU again and eventually found a GPU OC that ran firestrike without issues. +8mv core voltage, +175 core clock (for 1592mhz boost), and +100 on the vram (for 7.2gbps). So after bringing the OC back on my CPU, things got unstable again but at the same settings i had previously had stable. Confusing. Anyways, found my way back down to 4.4ghz and firestrike was now cooperating (and also valley, which started having issues with GPU OC after putting the CPU back to stock).

So thats where i ended up at with the 970 FTW+.
+8mv
+175 core (now 1592mhz boost)
+100mhz vram (now 7.2gbps)



Old Firestrike score



New Firestrike score

Go on HWBOT and look around. Pretty easy way to judge were you fell.

cdawall said:

Go on HWBOT and look around. Pretty easy way to judge were you fell.

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thank you

try heaven benchmark, it's a little more up to date.
you need to work on getting it all stable and able to finish firestrike, clock one item at a time to find it's limits, then combine them and adjust to get it stable.
please post the part number of the card, some people don't know that there are more than one ftw cards.

caddi daddi said:

try heaven benchmark, it's a little more up to date.
you need to work on getting it all stable and able to finish firestrike, clock one item at a time to find it's limits, then combine them and adjust to get it stable.
please post the part number of the card, some people don't know that there are more than one ftw cards.

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I did all that. OC'd the CPU, tested for stability. Then came the GPU. OC'd the core, tested until i found what appeared to be stable. Then started OC'ing the vram till i hit what i thought was stable. When i ran into issues, i turned the CPU OC off and started over on the GPU and VRAM then worked my way up again.

I may need to lower the GPU OC a little though. Playing BF1 last night, alt+tabbing was a disaster. Game would play AWESOME, but alt+tab caused the game to crash and got an error referencing the GPU. Had to reboot to get the overclock back since if i get those kinda errors, its like the GPU reverts to stock clocks even though afterburner has the OC applied. Rebooting fixes that. Playing it in borderless mode though, worked for hours without an issue like that. Alt tabbing didnt matter, cuz of borderless. Im not sure if there is any disadvantages to playing in borderless as opposed to fullscreen. My previous experience was always that it FPS took a small hit in windowed/borderless.

The GPU part number from EVGA is 04G-P4-3978-KR

Heaven benchmark more up to date than the newer fire strike? How does that work?!!

Edit: alt-taB may be busted in the game...I dont think an overclock affects that??

The toughest benchmark on you, IMO an is the 3dmark dx12 one.

I can run the 7970 in Sig up to 1250/1850 on all benchmarks except this one. It caps@1210/1650.

EarthDog said:

Heaven benchmark more up to date than the newer fire strike? How does that work?!!

Edit: alt-taB may be busted in the game...I dont think an overclock affects that??

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Alt-tab with bf1 in the beta always made my computer screwy, but it never crashed and it never threw a GPU error. I suppose i can update to the newest nvidia driver released today and try again before making a final judgement on that.

Tír na nÓg said:

The toughest benchmark on you, IMO an is the 3dmark dx12 one.

I can run the 7970 in Sig up to 1250/1850 on all benchmarks except this one. It caps@1210/1650.

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I will have to try a timespy run and see if it can complete.

A very well tuned 970 with a custom bios and good cooling will pull 14k+ graphics scores on Firestrike.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6557355

scores go up with more cpu cores as well. so make sure you arent comparing 4 core cpu to someone with a 6 or 8 core

dejo said:

scores go up with more cpu cores as well. so make sure you arent comparing 4 core cpu to someone with a 6 or 8 core

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Not if you're looking at the graphics score. The overall score doesn't matter much.