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GTX 970 hitting a wall - I think something is wrong

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Cryovenom

Registered
Joined
Feb 27, 2013
Location
Soviet Canuckistan
Hey Everyone,

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not terribly experienced with overclocking so I'm going on the assumption here that I've missed something, or that I'm doing something wrong because it seems like my overclocked settings are having negligible effects at all.

I'm running an ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 970 (STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5)

Stock clocks are:
Core Clock: 1114MHz
Mem Clock: 1753 MHz
Boost Clock: 1253 MHz

I've installed MSI Afterburner and gotten Unigine Valley going to check for stability and artifacts, with HWMonitor watching temps and GPUZ to make sure that I'm actually hitting apply on my settings.

I've found a pretty hard ceiling on mem clocks. Anything above +125 and I start seeing these little red and blue starburst-style artifacts occasionally in Unigine Valley. So I've backed that off to +125.
For Core Clock I've gone up to +185 so far and haven't seen any artifacts... but I also am not seeing increased temps and am barely seeing any increased performance.

Temps are staying around 72C whether stock clocks or 1299MHz/1815MHz
Passmark's 3D Mark scores are 8,284 stock clocks and 8,469 overclocked (a mere 2%)
Unigine Valley does 55.2fps/2309pts stock and 59.2/2477pts overclocked (a slightly more respectable 7%)

Does this sound right to you guys? Is there really that little to be gained with these cards?

For reference I checked a couple of reviews of the card online to see the clocks they topped out at:

Guru3d got 1264/2000
thepcenthusiast got 1261/1975
techpowerup got 1290/1990


So straight numbers-wise I'm in the right neighborhood for core/mem clocks.... but I haven't even hit passmark's site's average score of 8,598 for the GTX 970!

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Any advice?

Cheers,

Jon
 

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Which graphs in particular are we looking for?
Before calling it a night last night I tried a run with fans on 100% for the whole run and got near identical results (within the same variance you always get when re-running the passmark tests).

When I get home tonight I can grab a screenshot of the graphs. I'm assuming you mean the ones in MSI Afterburner. Is there a specific way to capture them, or do I just exit out of Unigine Valley or Passmark when the run is done and hit printscreen as quick as I can?
 
Passmark isn't the best for testing a GPU OC. Also are you checking the sensor page in GPUz to get the max boost clock? What it reports on the main page is never the maximum speed. Also when it comes to different cards they can be equipped with different memory IC. Yours is Hynix which won't OC as high as Samsung ICs will
 
Passmark isn't the best for testing a GPU OC...

Fair enough. What's a good test? I'm using Unigine Valley to check for artifacts, but the FPS and Score barely seem to move, so I'm not sure if it's a good test either.

....Also are you checking the sensor page in GPUz to get the max boost clock? What it reports on the main page is never the maximum speed...

I hadn't even looked at the sensor page in GPUz, I'll check that out!


...Also when it comes to different cards they can be equipped with different memory IC. Yours is Hynix which won't OC as high as Samsung ICs will

The Hynix memory explains why I am not getting as much out of the memory OC as a lot of folks online seem to be. At least with memory on my card there is a very definitive indication that I've hit a limit. I've repeated a few times and as soon as I break +130 on the mem I start seeing those artifacts so I know I'm topped out there.

I haven't pushed the core clock to that point yet - I got confused when I had exceeded the core clocks that I saw on the review sites and hadn't seen any artifacting or much of a performance difference so I stopped to ask you guys. +185 was where I stopped, think I should keep pushing it?

I found some articles today talking about a built-in power draw limit that apparently limits GTX 970 cards to 106% of the rated 145W TDP. Seems like I'd need an aftermarket bios and to bypass some resistors in order to go higher than that, at least according to these :

https://overclocking.guide/increase-the-nvidia-power-limit-all-cards/4/
https://cryptomining-blog.com/3757-...-target-limit-on-geforce-gtx-970-and-gtx-980/

Does that make sense? It it possible that I'm just hitting 153W (145W TDP * 1.06) so quickly as to not see much in the way of gains? The card is supposedly OC'd a bit out of the box so maybe there wasn't much headroom left...

I'm guessing that's what the graphs Maviryk asked for will show... I'll get those posted tonight.
 
Okay, not knowing exactly which graphs you guys wanted to see I grabbed most of them!

I ran Unigine Valley in non-full-screen in the background with MSI Afterburner and two copies of GPUz over top.
Here are the results:

Screenshot during Unigine Valley 1.JPG
Screenshot during Unigine Valley 2.JPG
Screenshot during Unigine Valley 3.JPG
Screenshot during Unigine Valley 4.JPG
Screenshot during Unigine Valley 5.JPG
 
Oh, your poor video card.

As a caveat, I'm not an expert, but it looks like your GPU is giving all it's got. The discrepancies in benchmarks could be background processes or drivers, but TBH you're not so far off that I would be concerned.
 
What do folks tend to use for benchmarking around here if not Passmark's 3DMark tests?

I want to get an idea of how I'm stacking up compared to other folks with GTX 970 cards.
 
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