“Stability” has a sort of loose definition, depending on who's asked, but ours is very definitive: Any artifacts at all will be considered “unstable.”Ī GPU with threatened stability due to overclocking will often exhibit soft failures initially, like blue flashes, texture tearing and artifacting, screen flickering, and driver crashes that are recovered. What makes the GPU lose stability?Īs frequency of the core clock continues to increase, the GPU will degrade in its stability. There are still longevity and endurance concerns with high overclocks, so it's unlikely that manufacturers will pre-overclock GPUs into the numbers we can achieve manually. Manufacturers may bin (sort) for higher-quality chips that will perform with greater stability at higher frequencies and voltages. There's a reason that the GPU doesn't just ship at its highest possible overclock, though.Įvery GPU has a defined “stable baseline” that achieves the TDP, thermal, and stability targets established by the semiconductor manufacturer – that'd be nVidia or AMD, in the case of relevant gaming GPUs. “Overclocking” is specifically referring to the action of increasing the clock-rate over stock, a process that eventually requires “overvolting” to ensure stability. Now go look at a CPU with a 4.0GHz clock-rate – it's staggeringly impressive that such a small semiconductor can cycle four billion times per second.Īlthough there's a lot more at play that determines our performance – because frequency is certainly not everything – the core clock-rate is what we spend most of our time modifying when overclocking a GPU. This unit of measurement can be translated as “oscillations per second” or “cycles per second,” so a 60Hz monitor would refresh 60 times per second a 1500MHz core clock on a GPU would poll 1.5 billion times per second (1MHz = 1 million hertz). As you all know, CPU and GPU frequencies are measured in hertz, normally in the millions or billions of hertz. I'll re-cover a few of those items before getting started.Īll microprocessors operate on a timed “clock-rate.” This clock “ticks” with regular, predictable intervals – just like a wall clock would – and does so at a frequency. We've previously written a CPU & GPU overclocking primer that explained the top-level basics of overclocking. Zotac GTX 980 Extreme review + OC / SLI benchmarks.The GTX 980 that we're using (technically, ours is branded by nVidia – they're the same, though).NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 & 970 Video Card Specsīefore getting started, these articles may interest you: HOW TO OVERCLOCK WITH EVGA PRECISION X GTX 970 HOW TOThis GTX 980 overclocking tutorial will walk through how to overclock nVidia's Maxwell architecture, explain power target %, voltage, memory clock, and more. We recently showed the gains yielded from high overclocks on the GTX 980 in relation to Zotac's GTX 980 Extreme and the reference card and, in some instances, the OC produced better performance than stock SLI pairing. The key aspects remain the same: Increase the clock-rate, play with voltage, increase the memory clock, and observe thermals new advancements include power target percent and its tie to TDP. This increase in GPU and memory performance does translate to a couple extra average frames per second and an a additional frame or two on the all-important minimum frames per second scale.GPU overclocking changed with the release of Maxwell's updated architecture. On the memory side of the equation we were able to boost the memory to an effective 7600Mhz, which is a 8.4 percent improvement over the card’s default 7010Mhz setting. HOW TO OVERCLOCK WITH EVGA PRECISION X GTX 970 FREEThis is an additional 12.7% of free performance that really will not take all the much effort to unlock. On the positive side we did manage to reach a peak of 1328MHz -or 150Mhz over the factory ‘stock’ setting. Hopefully at some point PNY will release an ‘OC’ or ‘OC2’ version that negates this cooling problem and allows for some insane overclocks. This is a shame as it is such a cool running chip, but the blower is basically only good enough at keeping a stock 970 cool. Sadly, because PNY did cut corners on the cooling solution this 970 will actually thermally limit itself long before you reach the actual physical limits of the Maxwell architecture. In the past PNY XLR8’s never let us down and provide ample amount of overclocking headroom. We really did have high hopes for this card and while there is still some headroom to be found, we did walk away a bit disappointed by this PNY XLR8’er card. Then using Unigine’s Valley benchmark we began stability testing. HOW TO OVERCLOCK WITH EVGA PRECISION X GTX 970 SOFTWARETo discover our PNY GeForce GTX 970 XLR8 4GB sample’s overclocking abilities we used EVGA’s Precision X software and began raising power and thermal thresholds to the maximum allowed and then increased the voltage also to the maximum permitted.
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