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What is a safe overclock settings for my Asus GTX 980 Strix card on MSI Afterburner?


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I am a complete beginner at overclocking of any kind and decided to try my hand at it. I heard that doing the wrong thing when overclocking can mess up your parts so I need help so I can know what I am doing.

I am using MSI afterburner to overclock my GPU. I dont even know what any of these perameters mean. So what settings and why should they be set to that value?

Core Voltage?
Power Limit?
Temperture Limit?
Core Clock?
Memory Clock?
Fan Speed? -says auto by that. I guess I dont need to set anything.

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Keep it simple.

 

1. Create a fan speed profile where the fan is at 100% at 72C. At 72C, the GTX 980 will start to throttle. You can set the minimum to something like 30% fan speed at 30C so it's quiet when idle.

2. Overclock just the Core Clock first. Up the Core Clock to 100, apply, then save. Run a single pass of Unigine Heaven 2.1. Keep track of the Average FPS. It's still the most stable benchmarking tool that I use. My overclocks will pass any other benchmark, but fail at Unigine Heaven 2.1, so that's why I still use it.

Settings:

Tessellation = Extreme

Anisotrophy = 16

Anti-aliasing = 8x

Full screen at your native resolution

 

My ASUS GTX 980 Strix I gave to my friend had a Core Clock overclock at 1508MHz Core Clock (Boost). You can see what your speed is by looking at the max (in red) for Core Clock in MSI Afterburner. If at 100 Core Clock (in MSI), it pass Unigine Heaven 2.1, up it to 150. If it passes there, go to 200. If it fails, hit the reset button in MSI Afterburner, and lower it to 190, and reset your monitor history by right-clicking it in MSI Afterburner. If it fails, go down to 180 and repeat.

 

3. Do the same tests and method as #2, but with only Memory Clock. The Strix I mentioned above got to 3851MHz Memory Clock. It will crash hard if it's too high, so you might need to do a hard reboot. Sometimes it will also pass Unigine Heaven 2.1, but your average FPS will be lower. That means it's still not stable.

 

Once that's all done, you found your stock overclock for both Core Clock and Memory.

 

If you want to do the advanced stuff, you'll want to read about it at Overclock.net's Official GTX 980 club. It entails copying your BIOS, modding your BIOS to increase TDP along with other things, and then flashing to your modded BIOS so you can increase your TDP to 126% or whatever. Mine only got to 1534MHz Core Clock with the extra 126% TDP, so it wasn't worth it for me.

 

Good luck, hope that helps.

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What El Captain said.

 

You'll know if you've gone too high if you spot artifacts. My 780Ti 'can' go above 1300Mhz, but it starts showing artifacts, so I figured that my card's sweat spot is 1300mhz. I had to do like El Captain said and use a custom bios for the card.

 

* It disabled GPU Boost, and makes it so that the amount of OC offset you add is the final target OC. There is no extra figeting done wiht GPU Boost, which allows you to fine tune the OC.

* Gave a better range for the TDP (all the way to 150% if you are crazy.)

* Gave greater range for the GPU Voltage. (1.212).

 

The best results I had was after putting my card under water, without a waterblock, I was only stable around 1200mhz. Anything above that was unstable or extremely hot.

Edited by MedievalNerd

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