gtx970 overclocking question

Yup go back a couple years, I'm overclocking my old GTX970. It's the Asus strix version. My card is on water with a universal block, so just the GPU is water cooled. Temps have not exceeded 50C overclocked, voltage boost and full load. Been using furmark for a stress test.

So far I got the GPU to 1450Mhz but the ram isn't going far. Only 125 increase and I'm not sure that is stable.

Here's the thing I find strange. All my overclocking and testing has never shown artifacts. The video just cuts out, outright crash.

Is this normal or is something else going on? I'm not overly familiar with the power limit setting. I have it at 110%, but wondering if I'm hitting a power limit before I can max out the card?

Thanks guys.

Forgot to mention, the memory and vregs have copper heatsinks attachedbto compensate for the removal of the stock air cooler.

Do you have good airflow over the vrm/memory? Artifactual my is typical of memory issues. If I remember correctly I couldn't get the memory of my 970 strix past that either. That was just with the stock cooler.

I think that's normal for a GPU crash. I don't see many super high 970 overclocks. Most are in the mid 1400's to low 1500's. Could just be you didn't win the silicon lottery. More power might or might not fix it. Since you have it on water already and it's an old card, what do you have to lose by pushing the power further?

My 970 is kinda funny too. If I don't mess with it ie change clocks, change power, change fan speeds, its fine, runs at 1404/1750 stock outta the box. As soon as I try to change something, it completely craps itself and will drop clocks like crazy. Its a bit of a process to get it back to normal, not really sure what is going on with it. If you leave it alone its great. It is a first gen one I believe, with the 6+6 power. I overclocked it as soon as I got it, not sure if I broke it or not. I did get it over 1500, cant do it now.

Thanks guys, I just found the behavior odd. Used to seeing artifacting.

In the end, I got the GPU to 1450, good enough. Increasing power limit does nothing. As for the memory, it basically doesn't overclock at all. Even a 100Mhz increase will crash after a couple hours with furmark. Anything less than that just isn't worth the effort in my opinion.

gpus can just lock up without artifacting. With all the new power profiles that Nvidia/AMD use in the proprietary algorithms, it's more likely to just hit a hard lock/crash, than see arfifacts these days.