Gigabyte 980ti windforce

Hey all, I just purchased a Gigabyte 980ti windforce along with a bunch of other parts to build a new system. IF anyone with experience with this card could give me some insight as to expected overclock, voltage settings, etc, etc it would be appreciated.

Forgot to mention, the parts won't be here until monday and I won't be building until friday. IDK why that might matter but I didn't want anyone to think I had the parts sitting here right now.

Im not sure how ASIC scores are really meant to come into play, but my MSI gaming got 71.1% and even without the water cooler i have now, it was quite happy to sit at 1500+, but wont do anything past 1550 happily.

Dont bother with the voltage slider in AB cos it does fuck all but make the voltage unstable (maybe youll have luck here but i also seen a lot of reports of this), set your power limit to 107% and you temp limit to 89, keep those fans under 70% cos it will start to sound, and try your luck at 1500/3750. Thats not much OC on the memory, but that can suck a lot of power and hit TDP max quickly. All i get from memory OC is a jittery/micro-stuttery feeling after 3600. Yours may play better of course but thats my experience.

I dont know what case you have, but a side fan and good top ventilation is a good idea. The VRM on mine is hitting 95c at my OC, which is normal if not good, thats according to the probe i have stuck on it which is plugged to the motherboard connector.

Edit - my card always sits at 1.187v, at any OC. Using the slider makes it go up and down and eventually crash. Never found a stable number out of the 87mv extra you can set.

I got the Corsair Carbide 600 C to house the new system.

Weird about the voltages. I got a better OC on my 970 with more voltage. Thanks for responding.

The 980 Ti uses a different core than the 970, using 54% more transistors (8,000,000,000 versus 5,200,000,000). You can't expect to compare power usage and clock speeds between the two.

Armenius said:

The 980 Ti uses a different core than the 970, using 54% more transistors (8,000,000,000 versus 5,200,000,000). You can't expect to compare power usage and clock speeds between the two.

Click to expand...

Oh I know that. I took "Don't bother with the voltage slider in AB cos it does fuck all but make the voltage unstable" to mean it was a problem with afterburner and not necessarily specific to the 980ti core.

ramrod126 said:

Oh I know that. I took "Don't bother with the voltage slider in AB cos it does fuck all but make the voltage unstable" to mean it was a problem with afterburner and not necessarily specific to the 980ti core.

Click to expand...

From what I followed, it seems it is the core rather than AB. I think the Gigabyte card has 2 bios, so maybe someone has a custom where the voltage will scale correctly.

Given I have a MSI brand card, its interesting to think AB wouldn't work with it. But then again I get memory readings in the billions of megabytes sometimes XD.

Well, I ended up with plus 150 on the core and plus 450 on the memory. Both went higher but would crash on certain benchmarks. They were fine in games but if it crashes at all I don't want it. So over all I am happy with it. Now it is time to OC my CPU.

Don't bother with adjusting voltage IF if you don't plan on bios modding.

The reason voltage adjustments fail is because Maxwell automatically throttles core clock+voltage after 64C. This behavior has been very documented on OCN, and the only way to stop this throttling is a bios mod. And even then there's a small workaround you'll have to do in order to expose some missing voltage sliders. One of the two missing voltage sliders is what controls this temp throttling behavior. Essentially what that slider does, is it defines the range of allowed voltages over a pre-defined temp range. So as you can imagine, if you set a range with those sliders, it'll simply select the appropriate voltage and boost bin according to the boost table as long as temps remain below 64C. Over 64C it seems to default to dropping a boost bin or two, and thus dropping a voltage bin or two as well, which wreaks havoc when you're trying to overvolt for a higher OC.

If you're up for some bios modding, one quick way to kill this throttling behavior is to peg all 3 sliders in the pic below to the same value. This way it ensures the GPU is only allowed to pick one voltage as soon as it enters the P0 state.

I haven't done bios tweaking since the days of my Radeon 9700 pro.....but that doesn't mean I won't try it eventually.

I remember this from the MSI Gaming thread on here. I saw this behavior myself, but whats interesting is I still experience fluctuations when mucking with this even though my card really see 50c on the core.

Do we know if VRM or RAM temperature or anything else is getting involved here? 150/450 is a nice OC, that would equate to 1500/3900~ for me. I'm getting the jitters and high tdp anywhere past +100 on memory


Edit - okay stable so far at +150/250 (1504/3604), just went an updated AB to 4.2 from 4.1.1.