You've got my attention. I did a quick google search and came up with
this Is that what I should be using? Essentially this is just a way flash the 970 to 980 clocks, yes? Is this safe? Do I need to look into custom cooling?
Correct thats the thread to use. You do not need custom cooling, unless you have a blower type card. I run the MSI GAMING GTX 970 with the stock fan curve in an ITX case.
Theres various things that can be done with the custom bios:
- Lock in max 3d clocks (similar to factory OC) without effecting the idle downclocking.
- Remove the power limit (100% in MSI Afterburner can report as 60% for example to prevent throttling
)
- Increase the power the card can request
- Increase internal clocks such as the cache
- Tweak the voltage table per clock bin to get optimum stability and votlage:clock speed scaling
- Allow Voltage up to 1.30v, from iirc 1.21v max
Before jumping on to a custom bios:
-
Dump and backup your Bios with GPUz.
- Use MSI Afterburner to judge the card with the overclock sliders. The memory can be overclocked without any bios mods. So you can atleast test its peak performance.
- Throw the Power Limit to 110%
- Max out the voltage in MSI Afterburner
- Play with the core frequency in MSI Afterburner
The next step is to run a custom bios for your card model specifically, or dump your bios and manually make the changes from the first post in that thread.
- You want to increase the peak voltage the card can run at.
- You want to remove the power limit
Then start playing with MSI Afterburner again, see if you can now hit a higher clock speed.
- I found Witcher 3 cutscenes to be very stressful - it was the only game that caused artifacts till i turned down my memory OC. Unigene Heave/Valley is also good to start with.
- When testing use a high fan speed to prevent any thermal throttling/heat induced instability.
Now once you dial in a good Core/Memory Clock and Voltage:Heat setup, then you can either allow MSI Afterburner to apply the OC on startup or play with the custom bios yourself to lock in the clock speeds for high load scenarios (gaming - idle downclocking still works a designed).
Lastly there are 2 internal clock speeds that you can increase to squeeze some more performance. In the Maxwell Bios Tweaker tool, you can set the L2C Max (cache) and XBAR Max (interconnect freq) fred's to match your peak Core freq.
There is a fair bit of reading to do in that thread, at least the first post, but feel free to request a start point (power limit removed and voltage unclocked) bios for your card in that thread.
If you want to know approximately how much you can gain, i score 14175 GPU Score in 3D Mark Firestrike benchmark at 1600/4000Mhz. Thats more than a 980. My daily is 1550/3850Mhz 1.23v. Default is 1140MHz, Boost 1279MHz, 3500Mhz Memory, 1.18v.
Thanks, and ok i get the point.
Edit, on the off chance that someone here has used both cards, is there a noticeable difference ?
Both cards should get close to 2000Mhz core speed after throwing the sliders to max in MSI Afterburner. All Pascal cards are running close to their limtis already.
