970 Overclocking (Boost) Question

A

adrift02

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 10, 2006
Messages
467
Hi all,

I was playing around with Fur Mark as an easy way to test my overclock boost results, and noticed that it won't rise above the stock core overclock. For example, I'm at +140 on my MSI Gaming 4G card (1254) and in Fur Mark that's the peak. If I try a game, boost kicks in (~1490), but Fur Mark won't do it.

Here's the weird part, if I turn off the "fur" rendering, Boost kicks in as normal, but that's with like 3k FPS and of course annoying coil whine. More importantly, GPU utilization drops to like 50%, along with TDP usage. Switch "fur" rendering back on and I'm back at 100% power/utilization but my clock speed drops back to stock. So I can't properly max the overclock to test it.

Any ideas why this is happening? It's not a major deal for gaming, but I'd like to be able to quickly test overclocks outside of games...
 
FurMark fur rendering is extremely GPU intensive and can be potentially dangerous to your GPU so AMD and NV built detection tool into their drivers to detect when FurMark is running in fur rendering mode and prevent the GPU from wasting its power rendering the fur. Of course when you turn that off the rendering is no longer intensive, hence the FPS and coil whine and low power usage.
 
Welcome to the world of the TDP limited scenario. You are basically maxing out the gpu. It is going to protect itself by not allowing the boost. Since it is running at the max load and building up temperatures at the same time. Once the card isn't maxing the TDP and building heat up. It will start back boosting like it normally should.
 
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If you want to test clock quickly outside of games I suggest running UniGine Valley/Heaven in windowed mode
 
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