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Official GTX 680 overclocking Thread!

After an hour or two of testing and many game runnings this is the highest overclock I could achieve on the reference cooler. Also I think I should mention this to people, my memory was "stable" all the way to 550 offset but I was actually losing performance on anything past a 400 offset. Be sure you check that these numbers are actually helping you :eek:

Edit: further testing shows 200+ core stable only even 201 crashes but 200 is just fine forever. ALSO the voltage is locked at a peak of 1175 it seems. Even though that voltage slider in EVGAprecisionX goes up to 1215 the slider resets to 1175 if I try that. I just know with that 1215 we would be hitting like 1350 core.

 
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I get the feeling it is going to be VERY difficult to standardize overclocks. Every game will clock differently. Just ran some SC2 campaign and my gpu stayed clocked at 1150 most of the time. When I tried to do a higher offset on the core, it stayed at 1110 the whole time. So hard to know whether my card is a good clocker or not!
 
gamed for hours at 200+ core no issues. Was clocking up to 1284 most of the time :O
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Thats exactly where my card tops out.
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Have you tried changing the fan profile? I got an additional 15 Mhz by keeping the temps below 80C, and then another 15 keeping it below 70C. I'm not sure the minor speed boost is worth the noise though - card starts to get loud at 70% fan speed.
 
Mine doesn't seem able to handle anything above 130 for any sustained period of time, this is with temps in the 60s and looping uniengine.
 
Ghoststalker said:
Mine doesn't seem able to handle anything above 130 for any sustained period of time, this is with temps in the 60s and looping uniengine.
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forgot about that one. Seems I wasn't totally stable at 200 at least for this benchmark, can do it a couple times at +180 though still running haven't crashed yet.
 
Forceman said:
Have you tried changing the fan profile? I got an additional 15 Mhz by keeping the temps below 80C, and then another 15 keeping it below 70C. I'm not sure the minor speed boost is worth the noise though - card starts to get loud at 70% fan speed.
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Yeah, thats with temps near 60c.
 
Interestingly enough I never see my power % go over 100 even though I have it set to 132% in Precision, maybe that's a bug. My highest stable OC in BF3 seems to be around +115 offset. Haven't yet worked on the memory overclock.
 
everyone seems to be reporting these very low numbers for their offset in BF3. Wish I owned it just to test my stuff better I guess.

Ghoststalker said:
Interestingly enough I never see my power % go over 100 even though I have it set to 132% in Precision, maybe that's a bug. My highest stable OC in BF3 seems to be around +115 offset. Haven't yet worked on the memory overclock.
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I have noticed some programs just wont go all the way to the power target.
 
Ghoststalker said:
Interestingly enough I never see my power % go over 100 even though I have it set to 132% in Precision, maybe that's a bug. My highest stable OC in BF3 seems to be around +115 offset. Haven't yet worked on the memory overclock.
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I think mine got to 110% a couple of times, but I've never seen it above that.
 
I'm not normally one to overclock my graphics cards as I've never considered the extra power consumption/heat worth the extra 1-3 fps I'd typically get from testing. That all changed with the GTX 680 though which auto-clocks itself anyway without any user intervention. I was regularly seeing my card clock the core to 1,137 MHz in many games even though I have v-sync (plus triple buffering) enabled to cap the framerate to 60 fps on my 24" HP2475w monitor. I obviously disabled v-sync for benchmarking but still never saw it go above 1,137 MHz even in demanding games.

So I started playing around with the offsets and discovered that the GTX 680 is actually a beast when it comes to overclocking and doing so makes a big difference to the framerates (more importantly the minimum ones are pushed closer or over 60 fps which is what I want) but while still consuming less power and giving off less heat than my GTX 580 on stock clocks! That's a win-win situation, right there! :D

I initially tested a number of games, including Alan Wake, Skyrim and The Witcher 2, as well as 3DMark11 and Heaven 3.0 benchmarks with a conservative +125 MHz on the core clock (since my card had already proven it was capable of 1,137 MHz) and +250 MHz on the memory clock (effectively raising the speed from 6 GHz to 6.5 GHz). The Power Limiter was set to +130% using MSI Afterburner v2.2.0 beta 15. The OSD confirmed the card was hitting 1,249 MHz on the core and 6.5 GHz on the memory and I saw no problems at all during testing; no freezes, no tell-tale artifacts and certainly no error messages so I decided to keep those for 24/7 use. The max. temps I saw were 75 C for a brief time while playing Alan Wake (at 1920x1200, maxed settings, 8xAA/16xAF, FXAA High). The GPU Boost feature is, IMO, an outstanding addition to the card.

I've seen a performance boost over my GTX 580 card of anywhere from 15% to 70% but on average the card appears to be around 25-30% faster. In 3DMark11, my old GTX 580 scored X2127 on the v285.62 drivers whereas my GTX 680 on the v301.10 drivers scores X3635 (with +125 MHz core/+250 MHz memory overclocks)! That's a massive improvement of 70%, by far the biggest I saw in all my testing.

3DMark11 Performance Comparison

3DMark11 Extreme Comparison

I did come across one oddity though while benchmarking. I had already set the Global profile's Power Management setting to "Prefer maximum performance" otherwise the card can actually underclock itself in less demanding games when using v-sync (which can be handy if you value your electricity bills!). I saw Skyrim drop to 860 MHz when using Adaptive power management but it still ran at a silky-smooth 60 fps for example. Anyway, I decided to raise the offsets further to see how far I could push my card. I set the core offset to +150 MHz and the memory offset to +350 MHz and ran some benchmarks. Again, I saw no signs that my card was struggling at speeds of up to 1,287 MHz core/6.7 GHz memory, which was really awesome, especially considering the temperatures with my custom fan profile still never exceeded 75 C.

However, I eventually spotted that Afterburner's OSD was showing the core clock at 705 MHz while playing another game (Mass Effect) and not the usual 1,006 MHz. Thinking it was maybe a bug in Afterburner because that value never changed, I loaded up GPU-Z and ran a graphics demo in a window and it confirmed via the Sensor tab that the core was indeed running at 705 MHz. I tried another game with v-sync off and it too was stuck at 705 MHz on the core clock. The only way that I was able to clear it was by restarting my PC. I should add at this point that I've been using a custom fan profile and never saw temperatures exceed 72 degrees C up to that point.

So what happened? Did I reach the max. of the card's TDP (GPU-Z at one point showed 102% power usage!) such that it had to force the core down to 705 MHz to reduce power (in which case why didn't it reset when I exited the game and ran another)? Or it a driver or even hardware bug? Has anyone else seen this behaviour when using the 'Prefer maximum performance' setting? Again, I'll reiterate that while using these overclocks I never saw any indication that they were too high, though I did get one "driver not responding" error when I first tried running the memory clock offset at +500 MHz (clearly that is too high for my card).
 
P.S. I can't help but wonder why the core clock showed as 705 MHz when it 'stuck' on my system. The pre-0.6.0 versions of GPU-Z for example erroneously display the GTX 680's default core clock as 705 MHz and FutureMark's SystemInfo still shows that value too even when everything else shows it is actually 1,006 MHz. So does that suggest it a software bug after all?
 
Daz1967 said:
P.S. I can't help but wonder why the core clock showed as 705 MHz when it 'stuck' on my system. The pre-0.6.0 versions of GPU-Z for example erroneously display the GTX 680's default core clock as 705 MHz and FutureMark's SystemInfo still shows that value too even when everything else shows it is actually 1,006 MHz. So does that suggest it a software bug after all?
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my card will occasionally half speed at 706 as well but it never stays there for long. If I had to guess I would say 706 is the lowest 3d clock.

left heaven looping all night at 170+ no crashes so I feel good.
 
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@Sojuuk - My problem was that when I loaded a game which had previously ran at a core clock of 1,006 MHz, it was still showing as 705 MHz, though the performance didn't seem noticeably worst which you'd expect if it really was 30% underclocked. That 705 MHz core clock never wavered either according to the OSD so it may well be something like a sensor bug or even a software one. Restarting my PC fixed it.
 
My 680 came last night, put it through several rounds of 3DMark11. Talk about wonky OCing. I read all the reviews so I knew how to work Precision. 3DMark will throw an error if you click off it before executing the benchmark, some error about not having display priority. Anyway, I couldn't get +100 core offset without a driver crash at first. Increased max power to 132% and this got me through one 3DMark run. Increased memory by 100, then 200 and only saw ~50 point increase in 3DMark, not surprisingly since it's not exactly memory starved (need to run Crysis 2 benchmark for that). Tried +150 on the core, driver crash. Best 3DMark score I've gotten so far is 9580. Trying to hit the 10K mark. More testing to come but so far I think I got a $hitty OCer.

I've also seen the down-clocking when playing a non-demanding 3D game. I have dual monitors and was able to monitor GPU-Z to confirm. Game still ran very smooth so I'm guessing it's a power saving feature.
 
200 GPU and 150 Mem offset on 3dMark. Going to try Heaven next.

P10500

Heaven isn't going to hold those clocks though.
 
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Ghoststalker said:
I've had stability in heaven and lost it in BF3, bizarre I know :)
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That's not uncommon at all. Unigine is a good starting point and I stopped using FM as it does stuff to a GPU that's just not necessary for stability testing IMHO. Typically nowadays I call a OC "solid" after a few hours of BF3.
 
Anyone want to teach me how to go about doing memory overclocking, I seem to have hit my limit with GPU.
 
Ghoststalker said:
Anyone want to teach me how to go about doing memory overclocking, I seem to have hit my limit with GPU.
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Just increase the limit for memory boost, just like the GPU. It's right there on the Precision/Afterburner screen.
 
Forceman said:
Just increase the limit for memory boost, just like the GPU. It's right there on the Precision/Afterburner screen.
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Oh I know that part, but I also know that you can hit ECC errors and thus your actual overclock is lower...but I don't really know how I should benchmark to see if that happens to me.
 
Ghoststalker said:
Oh I know that part, but I also know that you can hit ECC errors and thus your actual overclock is lower...but I don't really know how I should benchmark to see if that happens to me.
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You'll just have to test it and see at what point performance starts dropping. There's really no quick way to tell that I know of (although it would be nice if someone could come up with something to show what level of correction ECC was doing).
 
Hmmm OCCT seems to be a good way to quickly spot when you've gone too high. For shits and giggles I tried +500 and it instantly crashed, +400 was flickering like mad, +350 seemed golden.
 
To adequately test your memory OC fire up Crysis benchmark or run the Batman AC benchmark. That will stress the memory clock better than any synthetic benchmark.
 
So far 132% power and +100MHz core offset is rock solid. Hitting 1227 in BF3 on both cards. Top card in SLI is hitting around 65-70C, bottom card is mid 70s. Not using a very aggressive fan profile either.
 
Rizen said:
So far 132% power and +100MHz core offset is rock solid. Hitting 1227 in BF3 on both cards. Top card in SLI is hitting around 65-70C, bottom card is mid 70s. Not using a very aggressive fan profile either.
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How does +100 core offset hit 1227? I don't have mine yet, fill me in on the real world details. I though +100 would make it boost to 1158 tops?
 
xorbe said:
How does +100 core offset hit 1227? I don't have mine yet, fill me in on the real world details. I though +100 would make it boost to 1158 tops?
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I'm honestly not 100% sure. The GPU offset impacts both boost + base core, I believe, but someone please let me know if I am wrong. Then the power target also impacts the clocks (more power = higher clocks).

My cards would boost to over 1100 out of the box with only the power target set to 132%, and the default boost clock is 1058. So if you increase the power target it definitely will scale up more. I see 1175mv voltage at 1227MHz.
 
xorbe said:
How does +100 core offset hit 1227? I don't have mine yet, fill me in on the real world details. I though +100 would make it boost to 1158 tops?
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The number you put in Precision just adds that amount of freqs to whatever the card was boosting at stock, which varies by card. They are guaranteed to do at least 1058, but it seems like most of them will do a lot more than that. At stock, mine did 1110 or so, so putting a +120 gives me a final boost of 1230.

I need to look at my case cooling or something. With the default fan profile I get temps in the low 80s when playing BF3 and it's knocking 30 MHz off my boost. I don't know how you guys are getting 70C.
 
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