Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're overclocking a GTX 980 this is a how-to tutorial on how to overclock Maxwell specifically looking at the GTX 980 Maxwell has changed the game quite a bit for overclocking versus Kepler but still pretty easy stuff we can walk through it pretty quickly and have you going in no time so I have written a full guide on this that is very detailed if I skip steps in here check the link of the description below for the guide and that covers everything you could possibly want to know about overclocking max well let's get to it with the video component here first all you need a few tools for this you will need EVGA precision which I have open on the screen here you'll need gpu-z also open and here you're obviously going to need the newest version of the Nvidia drivers potentially with GFE if you want GFE I would recommend it at this point beyond those tools I would recommend also setting up some kind of spreadsheet like this one that you see on my screen this is what I use for keeping track of my overclocks how they perform and if they're stable or not and this allows me to go back in time later if I want to rollback my changes if I want to find a more moderate overclock that's not quite as extreme which is something I would recommend doing a few after you find the maximum overclock possible for endurance reasons on the semiconductor so here's how overclocking works with maxwell first of all you'll notice in precision this is what we are using to do the overclocking we are increasing the frequency of the base and boost clock and we will increase the memory clock a little bit as well though that's something I focus on less as it is a bit easier to do and a Maxwell introduces power target percentage which is what you see here at the top so this is how much power we are willing to supply the GPU over its stock 100% would be about 180 watts of max TDP now this is something that Nvidia originally advertised to the media that max CD he was about 165 watts for the GTX 980 however if we look at Kepler BIOS Tweaker I have opened the BIOS or the GTX 980 that I have the reference card this is a guide by the way for the reference card your mileage will vary for other cards and in opening the bios we can see that at 125 % TDP we're hitting about 225 watts now at a hundred percent we're at 180 watts so a 180 watts a 125 percent of that or one 1.25 times 180 is 225 so that means the board the PCB the vrm and the GM 204 chip itself can handle a maximum 225 watts that's pretty good but certainly nowhere near what some of the aftermarket cards will allow you to do so looking at the power target here we're going to increase that once we start hitting walls once the overclock becomes unstable we also have the GPU temperature target I leave this untouched for overclocking that's just how hot maximally you want the GPU to get we have the GPU clock offset which is what we will focus the most on this plays with the base clock boost clock and then we have the memory clock offset which is just overclocking the memory we'll do that in a bit over here on the right side we have the voltage which we increase for stability so in the guide I talked about the concepts of overclocking we'll cover them very briefly here in overclocking what you're trying to do is increase the frequency of the semiconductor of the chip in this case the GP is GM 2o for GPU we're trying to increase that boost clock and we can increase it to an extent without having to touch voltage it will remain stable up to depending on your card depending on your chip because all chips are made differently it could be 100 50 megahertz could be honored 70 megahertz it might be 200 megahertz before it starts exhibiting instability and that's very easy to do once it does exhibit instability which is normally shown in the way of blue flickers driver crashes screen flickering or texture tearing things like this once you see those instabilities you'll need to either step back the clock to regain stability or increase the voltage to supply more voltage to the Jeep you so that it can sustain that higher clock rate without these issues and you only can go up to one point two five six volts on Maxwell on the GM 204 980 chip so we do have a limit there of how high we can go before needing an aftermarket card of some sort and do keep in mind that higher voltage means higher temperature which also threatens stability and definitely threatens the longevity of the card so a few disclaimers overclocking can cause permanent irreversible damage to your components if you do it irresponsibly or if you're trying for an extreme overclock overclocking at a moderate rate will not cause serious damage you can definitely get a moderate overclock out of almost any component and the life of the system will be expired before that component dies due to your overclocking overclocking may also void warranties so do keep that in mind and they can check so tools gpu-z we will be using for monitoring the boost clock to make sure that overclock is actually applied because your softer may tell you it's applying but Boost 2.0 on Maxwell and Kepler will throttle back the clock once it feels like there's not enough power available or there's stability issues so we'll throttle back we need gpu-z to tell us specifically what our clock is sitting at we also need it to tell us the temperatures and things like that EVGA precision we're using for the overclocking Kepler BIOS Tweaker you do not need that's just to look at your bios if you want to see sort of the boost tables the power table stuff like that this spreadsheet I would recommend creating one exactly with these headers and just keep track of everything sorry for ease in the future but not necessary certainly and then finally only 3dmark firestrike which is a GPU benchmarking tool this is not a is it's not something that will load your GP 100% all the time fire strike extreme will for the most part but we can't use fir mark because the boost clock has issues issues being triggered properly in fir mark so we're using 3d mark fire strike and there are other burnin tools if you want to do full burn and test let's get started for overclocking first what we're going to do is look at our base settings and we are currently sitting at eleven hundred twenty six megahertz for the GPU clock and the boost clock is the red the red mark here so that's a little over twelve hundred I believe it's twelve sixteen from memory and that's not quite good enough for me I want some more power than that so we're going to increase this it's very important that you do this incrementally I know very well with this specific GPU I have in the system will do but I have other gtx 980 s that are different and they're all different so do the same for mentally that said we know as a general rule of thumb that you can increase the clock at least 100 megahertz generally 150 170 megahertz before you have any issues whatsoever other than perhaps changing the power target so we can just jump ahead to one of those numbers and then after that point will increase probably about 10 15 mega Hertz at a time eventually you hit a wall you start doing one to five megahertz increases so I'm going to type in 150 right here we're doing a 150 mega Hertz increase for now let's I'm just going to increase the power to 110 percent I want to note running the power target at max at 125 percent for extended periods of time can threaten the longevity of the GPU only run it like that if you're doing benchmarking then throttle it back once you find your max number unless you're just benchmarking so here's what we're doing for now we're going to apply this actually you know what let's let's increase I will leave the memory clock alone now well apply this we have zero millivolt over voltage and once we've applied this you go to the sensors on GPUs II tell it to log to file and we're going to give it a name I like to title these my settings so 150 overclock we'll call it and save so now it is login type file every second what we do next is open 3dmark and this will i've got 3d mark pro or advanced or whatever it's called and we're just going to run it I normally run extreme you won't have this if you have the free version so we'll turn that off don't need the demo so we run it when this runs it will burn in the GPU slightly it will basically benchmark for framerate and stability it's a couple minute long test I'm not going to show all of it here but basically all you're looking for you is stability you don't want to walk away from this test because it might not tell you about some instabilities like texture tearing so while you're watching this benchmark keep an eye out for things like glue flickering texture tearing black flickering stutters anything like that and you're going to let this run normally you'll notice instability in the first set of tests there are three sets but sometimes that I don't see it till the second one so I already know that this is stable because I've already done this I'm going to cancel out of this you should let it run in full when you let it run in full it'll give you a report with your score which is a made-up number calculated by fire strike and FPS and things like that log it in your document and also log if the overclock was stable or not now this is only a couple minute test so we don't know for sure if it's going to be stable in the long term but once you start finding that threshold or stability and instability we'll do a longer for our burn and test overnight or something like that so we know this is good let's open up our document that we just created with gpu-z and I know that was 150 - OC you can see I've done this quite a bit here so here it is this is what it looks like you can load this into Excel or calc or something like that if you would like to but this is fine for me in the first column we have the clock scroll through here look for the maximum number Boost 2.0 means that it's not going to run with a number all the time you can force it to run at the number all the time but it's not great for the GPU and will be worse on stability because I won't be able to throttle back when it wants to recover an unstable clock so here we have 14 or 9.6 now you'll notice that is actually lower than what what precision tells us we have I don't know why that's not showing up that should say 150 as you know so if we we click here we'll see down below that at our 150 number we should be in the range of 12 78 megahertz for the GPU clock which means boost will be slightly above that 1409 is actually going to be above what our advertised boost is but that's okay because that's how this works so we know this is stable now we can increase more we'll go back to precision and at this point we're just going to look for an unstable number without touching voltage and I want to do it within reason so that we can throttle back so let's jump up to 200 megahertz I'm going to go ahead and increase the memory clock at this point 200 megahertz as well we're leaving power target at 110 percent and now when I test 3dmark just to trigger instability I'm running it with extreme we are going to see if this is unstable or not so new file 200 - OC run 3d mark and this will run if it's not stable it'll crash it'll do flickering anything like that and then we need to start playing with voltage or throttle back the clock over talking Maxwell is very easy you basically just change your power percent target number and you change the clocks as necessary and then you increase voltage in small steps and only about 6 millivolts at a time to sustain stability of the GPU and in doing so you'll eventually hit a wall because Maxwell only has so much power to provide in this case 225 watts max to the clock and to the voltage so between those two things you've got to really push the clock as high as possible before messing with the voltage because increasing voltage will eat into our power allowance or power budget which we want to reserve for the actual clock rate because that's what we're trying to increase so you need to do all this incrementally keep voltage as low as possible generally six to 12 millivolts at a time if you know that it's very unstable you can probably push 12 and then rerun the tests see if it crashes or not this looks like it's actually stable so far but we'll see see if that holds out okay so I cut a head what you just saw was a red flash and then a black flash I consider that unstable that is not okay in my opinion because that means that the GPU is starting to lose its ability to perform stabili and it's just it's eventually going to crash or cause other problems so we saw some flashing that means it's time to start playing with other numbers here this precision version seems to I think it's an issue with with recording where we're seeing some of this text disappear so at 200 megahertz were having issues now in my log file I logged that I was able to do at two hundred thirty megahertz overclocked with a power of 23 percent and over voltage of 12 you will need to step up incremental e to get these numbers and figure it out so if I increase it six it might sustain the voltage maybe we can increase this a little bit but we'll leave it at 110 for now hit apply because you only want to change one thing at a time and then read benchmark it I already know what's going to happen for this it will still it will be a bit better it'll be more stable but still have some instability on occasion so at this point what I would do is increase the power percent one to 115 and hit apply and and then consider increasing the voltage depending on the results of this now once you start hitting this state it's good to increase these numbers a small bit at a time so I'll increase this to thirty I know that I had my memory at 211 we can really that was just kind of a random number we can do 225 and then we'll test this number you'll test it and maybe it's stable if it's stable great push it another 10 megahertz 15 megahertz once you find instability increase the voltage a little bit if it's still unstable increase the power target a little bit and then voltage a tiny bit more you probably don't want to go too high in the voltage and remember you only have one point two five six we can see here I'm getting instability red flashes immediately I'm going to catch this test I already know it's not going to work and increase the voltage in this case so I'm going to go back over to precision increase the voltage plus plus 12 hit apply we'll test it again and at this point if it's not stable we can play more with voltage more power target at some point in your overclocking process you will hit a stage where it is no longer possible to just increase voltage or power in order to sustain that overclock that is your wall that's as high as you're going to go this is the point where you want to throttle back a tiny bit to a point where it is stable bench market log your numbers and then go back to a modern overclock we can see here I'm still getting red flashes so at this point what I would probably do is increase the power percent 125 just to make sure there's enough power for the clock and for the over voltage that I am currently applying and then I will increase the voltage to plus 18 we can we should probably stop there and test because we've already changed enough at this point each time you change something you're going to want to start gpu-z again and log the file log the temperatures you can average them if you want I have a guide on that and just make sure you know what you're looking at I'm being a bit quick here because it's it's tutorial so you can see I'm still unstable we're running into issues where we need to figure out what the problem is and in this case it's probably a mix of the clocks being high and the voltage not being high enough so we just keep increasing and keep increasing eventually we find a stable rate and I have all those logs here because I've done this so my highest stable overclock was really to 85 which produced a fifteen thirty seven point seven boost clock logs through gpu-z with a memory overclock of 325 percent power 18 millivolts over voltage and I it's not logged here but I forced the fan speed 75% to make sure it was cooling properly which is probably part of our issue here today so you just need to incrementally step up you'll eventually find a comfortable overclock and all that's detailed in my guide please let me know if you have any questions whatsoever that is how to overclock Maxwell just do small steps and once you find a moderate number in my instance here 295 was my max 285 was my most stable max I would probably throttle back to 250 or 230 potentially even less maybe 200 maybe 1 180 and leave it at about 180 megahertz in my case for my GPU with the power at 115 percent and that will preserve your GPUs endurance without really losing too much performance so do be careful with this it is possible to cause damage your GPU let me know if you have any questions whatsoever and I will see you all next time peace