Gadgetory

this is my Titan test bench and this is the Titan overclocking guide overclocking Titan is very different from previous generation GeForce products due to the way that GPUs boost to is implemented compared to GPU boost one so first let's show you the test bench really quickly here we've got 16 gigs of muskan copperhead memory it's kind of hiding here don't worry too much about it a 4.4 gigahertz 3770k processor under an H 100 we've also got a Maximus 5 formula motherboard from Asus at GeForce GTX Titan of course we'll need one of those and our benchmark of choice although it's not we're not really using it for benchmarking purposes is Crysis 2 so we're using this as our stability test and we're using EVGA precision as the overclocking utility now GPU boost 2 differs from GPU boost 1 in one primary way instead of relying on GPU voltage GPU clock speed and the power target for the board itself GPU boost 2 relies on the clock speed the voltage and the temperature of the GPU because what kills video cards in the long term what kills a processor in the long term is voltage and temperatures over time so if Nvidia knows that okay well that end user is controlling the temperature they don't have to account for it being sort of a worst case scenario so what we see here in EVGA precision if we can actually open it there we go is the configuration that I'm using now this graphics card right here is supposed to deliver sort of a and 867 megahertz boost clock however without changing anything because we're in a relatively cool room this GPU was running at nearly 1 gigahertz before we even changed the offset that's because the temperatures were under control so I'm going to come in here I'm going to show you how I would overclock a Titan or any video card using GPU boost 2 because you can change your fan speed curve okay so come in and have a look at what we can do fan curve so I would start with the fan curve and I'd say okay I am willing to accept the noise level of a 70% fan as a worst-case scenario so I'd take that 70% and I'd put that up near the temperature target that I'm going to set the fan speed is very related to the temperature target so I go okay yep the temperature targets going to be 80 degrees or 85 or 90 degrees and I'm willing to tolerate this fan speed okay now you know that that's your worst case scenario that is how your fan is going to ramp up so that's going to determine your maximum so then what you do is you go in and you go okay well voltage wise I would just crank it up because it doesn't really matter because the GPU will change its voltage as much as it wants to but it won't go too far because the temperature is going to hold it back before it's going to apply more voltage to itself so it'll actually keep voltage under control on its own so I've just kind of crank that up then the next step is I would start to play around with the power target so power target I just turn up to the max and you can link or unlink the temp target in the power target set a temperature target you're comfortable with this is where some of that customization comes in so I could set a fan curve that goes okay I want to keep the fan speed low and I'm okay with higher temperatures I understand that that's going to make the GPU clock itself down and lower its voltage sometimes but that's that's a compromise that I'm comfortable with or you can go OK temperature target 70 degrees fan speed set a very aggressive curve and that way you can actually keep those temperatures low and the GPU will fight to stay there again by sort of ramping up voltage and ramping up frequency as much as it can but then backing off if that temperature starts to go up so playing around with the power target and the temperature target as well as the fan curves and the voltage is all somewhat related once you've set those up the way that you want them so in my case I set a fan curve that had it ramping up to I think I have a temperature target of 90 degrees I'm willing to tolerate that and I played around with the fan speeds manually and I said okay you know what 65% is about as loud as I can tolerate so I set that curve then I made it much more aggressive so it's a very gradual ramp up until then and then once we hit that 90 degrees I'm going to say okay fan go ahead and go crazy to bring yourself back down here if that's what it takes then what you start to do is play around with the GPU clock offset make sure you're monitoring because you can set a GPU clock offset of 300 megahertz but at the end of the day if the voltage if the temperature is being exceeded or it needs too much voltage to get there it seeds the power targets or whatever other limiting factors come into play your GPU might not actually be clocking itself up that high so you need to make sure that you're popping out of your application that you're using to test your overclock and making sure that it's actually even running at a higher frequency so you turn those up until you either run into stability issues or you notice that the GPU is not clocking any higher then you have some options you can turn up your fan curve so you can have it be more aggressive and that might allow you to attain that higher frequency or you can go you can turn up your voltage if the temperatures were already under control you can go okay let the GPU have more voltage or you can go okay I guess that's enough for me this is the compromise that I'm willing to accept once you're done with your GPU clock offset and you say okay this is this is where I'd settled in it's either you know got to back it off for stability or those other factors then you start with your memory clock offset so the consistent performance that we were able to get out of our Titan on an air-cooled test bench and this is all great news for overclockers because they can just throw a water block on it set the voltage to max set the frequency to max and let the card basically overclock itself anyway what we were able to do on a air-cooled test bench was a consistent clock speed on the GPU of about 1.1 6 gigahertz in a 3d application which is running right now it's running at around the around 95 to 100% board power when the games actually running when we've been in it for a while and the memory clock of three point three four eight gigahertz so that is at double data rate almost six point actually it's about six point seven gigahertz on the memory and then one point one six gigahertz on the GPU so the performance of this is absolutely outstanding and even in a game like Crysis 3 which we're running at extremely high settings so you can see right here using EVGA precision monitoring I can see what everything's running at what my memory usages were running at around 140 fps in Crysis 2 which is just outstanding so I hope this has been helpful for you guys and good luck with your overclocking endeavors whether it's on a Titan or some other video card that supports GPU boost 2 don't forget to 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