The Official GTX980/970 OC & Benchmark Perf. Thread

My ASIC score is 79.4. Still my most stable OC is +110/+300 or +110/+350 can't go higher if I want to play Shadows of Mordor without the Driver Recovering error occurring at some point. Precision X 16 can't do overvoltage it seems I can enable it but I can't adjust the number at all so it's effectively disabled. There is seems to be little difference between +110 vs +114 vs +116 GPU settings in anything but the 3D Mark scores. Game wise I get about the same scores in SoM or the Uniengine Benchmarks (within 2 - 3 fps) so I think overall I am fine leaving it as is for stability. In memory clocks there is 0 difference between +350 and +300. IIRC I need a difference of at least 100-150 for memory to show about 1 FPS decrease or increase in the Uniengine benchmarks. The max shown in the Precision X graphs was GPU 1514, Voltage 1.212 (107%), Temp 63c, Fan 61%. This has been one of the best graphics card upgrades I have ever done, everything is silky smooth. :)

One thing to mention, I think that if you get the driver recover error you need to reboot. I haven't been doing that because I figured it recovered so things are fine. I got that occasionally with my old GTX670 card and I didn't seem to have any issues even if I did not reboot. Earlier today, my stable settings became unstable after I tried a higher setting and got the driver recover error. Not sure if it was just an anomaly or not but after the reboot, I played a solid 2 hours at my stable settings, while before the reboot about 20-30 minutes the driver recover error happened again.
 
Did anyone else have trouble running the Shadow of Mordor benchmark? Game crashes and becomes non-responsive every time I try, OC or no OC. No other issues in every other game or benchmark though hmm.

Oh never mind, I had gone back to the 344.11 driver a few days ago because I've been having a driver issue with FFXIV. Updated it back to 344.16 and the benchmark runs fine!

With everything on Ultra settings, I get this on my MSI 970 Gaming:
Average FPS: 83.59
Max FPS: 156.04
Min FPS: 54.68

Still got my OC of +150/+435, no change to the voltage.
(had to re-do the benchmark because I forgot I had two other games still open too)
 
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Marcdaddy said:
Well one of cards reports 1.25 and the other cards 1.186. This whole thing is one big mess!
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If you are still around. I had an idea. Maybe turn off "Synchronize both cards" options in AB.

Just curious then if the volts would still be fucked up. I am at work right now...lol
 
I'd also try flashing both cards to the same BIOS and see if that does anything. (to be more specific, flash both cards with the bios on the card that's actually running full volts)
 
DASHlT said:
Also like to add my Gigabyte 970 GAMING card have a different bios on each card.

Not sure whats that about.
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DASHIT - Can you check the boxes of your cards and see are both your cards revision 1 or is one revision 1.1. Gigabyte has already listed a card revision 1.1 on their site.

revenant said:
I got 11k in firestrike with my 770s at max OC and got 14,700 with the 970s. It feels low, but that's about a 33% increase.. still seems like SLI scaling isn't working great on that test. I have no gsync to disable, I have checked everything.. both gpus are hitting 99% work load while running the test. I enabled pci-e 3.0 with the hack, that actually gave me good boost. Running the test in SLI performance mode with surround disabled yields the best results. I'm going to OC my cpu some more and see how that affects things.. I think my overall score is being held back from my CPU.
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You know there is a separate "graphics score" in 3dmark. That's the one to check to see how much difference there is between your old cards and your new ones. Your gpus aren't going to help your physics score so your overall score won't be that different. If you are getting 14,700 graphics score for 2 970s then yes that would be extremely low. But I am guess you are getting 22-25k graphics.
 
picket23 said:
DASHIT - Can you check the boxes of your cards and see are both your cards revision 1 or is one revision 1.1. Gigabyte has already listed a card revision 1.1 on their site.
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Will do, at work right now so will post later in the morning. Debating on either sending these back to Newegg or just selling them on here to 1 lucky customer. Might just wait a bit for things to mature.....Still debating though, there are ALOT of games coming out too..
 
Here's mine, is this considered decent compared to some other people's single GTX 970s? It's an MSI Gaming card.

Clocks are set to 1350/2025 (8100 effective memory clock). Rated boost clock is 1489, but during benches I've seen it peak at about 1573. ASIC is 75%.

aJwHdjV.png


I definitely feel this card is capable of a lot more; I hope the issues with the BIOS/drivers sort themselves out soon enough.
 
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Yeap, drivers need some work for SLI big time. Second card is not getting the same volts as the first card.
 
DASHlT said:
Is it undervolting the 2nd card?
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nevermind, :D. Forgot I had my highest ASIC scoring card as my second GPU. First and third GPU are 68.3% and 68.8%, while second GPU is 71.1%. Difference in voltage is only like 0.019volts. So hardly anything.
 
Yup, you guys are running into what Goldentiger and I have been noticing this whole time. 1 Card runs at a lower voltage than the other. No matter what you do. Swap cards and the issue doesn't follow the card. Disable SLI and run each card alone in your rig, both run at normal voltage 1.225. Bump voltage 1.250. Pop the second card in, the problem comes back. For me it's card 1 that is being under-volted by about .5mv.

The problem is that the card being under-volted can't run the same clocks as the other card because it lacks the voltage to do so. There is a thread in the Nvidia Forums here https://forums.geforce.com/default/...r-voltage-than-the-other-driver-bug-/#4328780 created by goldentiger.

Please post to check in and let them know your also having the problem. There is a nvidia rep checking into the problem. I'm sure he'll be able to replicate it and get the driver team to look into it. The more people that confirm the faster they'll fix it (hopefully).
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Yup, you guys are running into what Goldentiger and I have been noticing this whole time. 1 Card runs at a lower voltage than the other. No matter what you do. Swap cards and the issue doesn't follow the card. Disable SLI and run each card alone in your rig, both run at normal voltage 1.225. Bump voltage 1.250. Pop the second card in, the problem comes back. For me it's card 1 that is being under-volted by about .5mv.

The problem is that the card being under-volted can't run the same clocks as the other card because it lacks the voltage to do so. There is a thread in the Nvidia Forums here https://forums.geforce.com/default/...r-voltage-than-the-other-driver-bug-/#4328780 created by goldentiger.

Please post to check in and let them know your also having the problem. There is a nvidia rep checking into the problem. I'm sure he'll be able to replicate it and get the driver team to look into it. The more people that confirm the faster they'll fix it (hopefully).
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Yea think im going to leave my GPU Clocks alone. Ill stick the memory to +400 and just go from there.

Luckily I am still a lil CPU Bound for my 120hz to be solid. Plan to overclock the 3770k more now since I just got an H100i on it.

Thanks for the link to that thread. I will post on it as well.
 
Velgus said:
Here's mine, is this considered decent compared to some other people's single GTX 970s? It's an MSI Gaming card.

Clocks are set to 1350/2025 (8100 effective memory clock). Rated boost clock is 1489, but during benches I've seen it peak at about 1573. ASIC is 75%.

aJwHdjV.png


I definitely feel this card is capable of a lot more; I hope the issues with the BIOS/drivers sort themselves out soon enough.
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Holy crap... I'm "only" running +150/+435 on my MSI 970 Gaming without having to raise the voltage, and I thought THAT was amazing lol. Now you have me wanting to push mine more!

Is that completely stable in everything for you? I've run countless Unigine benches, 3DMark, Tomb Raider benches, Shadow of Mordor benches, played hours and hours and hours of games and I'm totally stable so far. But thanks to your overclock... I wanna push more now :p

BTW, your results are pretty close to mine. I don't wanna link the giant picture again for everyone to have to see, but here's the link to my OC and some benches http://i.imgur.com/muYUdEG.png Your valley score is about 220 higher than mine. Tomb Raider bench got me an average of exactly 60.0 on Ultimate settings.
Shadow of Mordor on Ultra:
Average FPS: 83.59
Max FPS: 156.04
Min FPS: 54.68

Think I'm gonna go try to push this card a bit ;) By the way, what speed do you have your processor at? Just curious.
 
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Syribo said:
Think I'm gonna go try to push this card a bit ;) By the way, what speed do you have your processor at? Just curious.
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As someone else said in another thread.. "This is [H]ardOCP where we push our hardware until it breaks, then throw it in the oven to fix it" or so it went. :D
 
Lord_Exodia said:
As someone else said in another thread.. "This is [H]ardOCP where we push our hardware until it breaks, then throw it in the oven to fix it" or so it went. :D
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And also not to mention the whole spending all your money on hardware, even if you'll be living in the box the parts came in on the street haha. That's what this forum does to me. Did I need that 970? Nope. Did I get it anyway? Yup. Am I planning on getting a second I really don't need considering I game at 1080p? Yup... because this forum also corrupted me into wanting a nice 1440p monitor as well.. damn it lol.
 
DASHlT said:
Both are REV 1.0
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Hey which of your 2 cards overclocks better and which bios version does it have? Maybe you can flash the worse card with with the better cards bios to get them to behave similarly.

This will not fix the voltage issue (most likely) as both of my cards have the same bios and do it. Bios flashing is working as long as your flashing a bios that the card will take (currently any modifications will not work)
 
So I was reading that win8.1 seems to score higher on firestrike than win7 due to DX11.1 features, or is that just for the 'extreme' version?.... If this is so this is why I my scores are a little lower than expected... possibly...
 
DASHlT said:
Yea think im going to leave my GPU Clocks alone. Ill stick the memory to +400 and just go from there.

Luckily I am still a lil CPU Bound for my 120hz to be solid. Plan to overclock the 3770k more now since I just got an H100i on it.

Thanks for the link to that thread. I will post on it as well.
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1080p? At that res, I benefited more by raising the core speed than memory.

Waterblock finally arrived, now to just wait for some modded bioses so this puppy can fly.
 
Well, my overclock is slowly ticking down. I can definitely run some benches/games at +150/400, but its looking like +125/400 is more realistic for my card. A little disappointing (I guess?) but not bad. Breaking 1500 mhz in most games without issue.
 
Hmm did the hard power limit mod. My 980 seems stable at 1537/7800. My firestrike score went from 13050 to 13100 for the same settings pre & post mod. Mod works btw (soldering over the two shunt resistors). Power limit reported at 30% :) no idea what I am actually using, but no fires yet!

My core only has 25 MHz left on the slider... My ram has a ways. I think I can get up to 8,000 MHz on the ram but had the computer stolen away. :/. Overall my core needs more slider room and voltage via the eventual bios mod. More of a "tickles my balls" exercise to max out my ram since I was hitting power limit before.

Overall findings for me:

- kraken G10 install: 12400 to 13050 firestrike (Lower temps are more stable and/or power(powerlimit) from not using a fan going to OC instead?)
- power limit mod: 13050 to 13100, more headroom for ram OC? More stable OC due to no throttling? TBD
 
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So dumb question time: Does anyone know how the dual bios on the G1 970 works? I imagine it's a switch somewhere on the card, but I couldn't find it when I looked briefly before installing it.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Hey which of your 2 cards overclocks better and which bios version does it have? Maybe you can flash the worse card with with the better cards bios to get them to behave similarly.

This will not fix the voltage issue (most likely) as both of my cards have the same bios and do it. Bios flashing is working as long as your flashing a bios that the card will take (currently any modifications will not work)
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Hmmm (just woke up) good idea

Looks like my top card volts can get up to 1.267 (when SLI is disabled).
 
Syribo said:
Holy crap... I'm "only" running +150/+435 on my MSI 970 Gaming without having to raise the voltage, and I thought THAT was amazing lol. Now you have me wanting to push mine more!

Is that completely stable in everything for you? I've run countless Unigine benches, 3DMark, Tomb Raider benches, Shadow of Mordor benches, played hours and hours and hours of games and I'm totally stable so far. But thanks to your overclock... I wanna push more now :p

BTW, your results are pretty close to mine. I don't wanna link the giant picture again for everyone to have to see, but here's the link to my OC and some benches http://i.imgur.com/muYUdEG.png Your valley score is about 220 higher than mine. Tomb Raider bench got me an average of exactly 60.0 on Ultimate settings.
Shadow of Mordor on Ultra:
Average FPS: 83.59
Max FPS: 156.04
Min FPS: 54.68

Think I'm gonna go try to push this card a bit ;) By the way, what speed do you have your processor at? Just curious.
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Everything's been stable for me so far, 3DMark, Unigine Valley and Heaven, Catzilla, Furmark, Tomb Raider bench, Hitman:Absolution bench, Bioshock Infinite bench, and additionally playing several hours of each a heavily modded Skyrim and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

I honestly think this card is capable of so much more, but there seems to be some throttling issues and driver crash issues caused by the current drivers/BIOS (some people were talking about it much earlier in this thread). I get those issues if I bump my voltage 'at all' with my current overclock settings. That said, it's pretty great that even at maximum stress, this card barely hits 60 degrees C.

I somehow got 98.6 on Tomb Raider bench (also Ultimate Settings). Yours seems a bit low, did you change the anti-aliasing to x4 MSAA or the Shadow settings? For Ultimate it sets mine to FXAA and Medium shadows.

I didn't record my 'proper/unmodified' Shadow of Mordor bench (and I'm a bit too lazy to remove SweetFX at the moment), but I think it was about 86-88 for me when I did do it originally.

I'd definitely give pushing the card a go. And my CPU isn't a very good overclocker, I'm on air cooling and I can't get it stable higher than 4.4GHz without setting the voltage and temperature outside my comfort zone.

You can see some of my other benchmark results here.
 
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tonyftw said:
1080p? At that res, I benefited more by raising the core speed than memory.

Waterblock finally arrived, now to just wait for some modded bioses so this puppy can fly.
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1440p@120hz.

While playing BF4 64 man MP. On some maps I actually will max out my CPU's to 99% while hovering around 80-90fps. This tells me I need more POWER!
 
DASHlT said:
1440p@120hz.

While playing BF4 64 man MP. On some maps I actually will max out my CPU's to 99% while hovering around 80-90fps. This tells me I need more POWER!
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that doesn't make any sense. i get the same when i remove gpu bottleneck by turning settings down. do any of the graphics settings affect cpu? effects maybe?
 
DASHlT said:
1440p@120hz.

While playing BF4 64 man MP. On some maps I actually will max out my CPU's to 99% while hovering around 80-90fps. This tells me I need more POWER!
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Yeah, bf4 feels much smoother with an intel hexcore at 120+hz. Do you have hyperthreading off out of curiosity?
 
tonyftw said:
Yeah, bf4 feels much smoother with an intel hexcore at 120+hz. Do you have hyperthreading off out of curiosity?
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Yea its on. I can hit 4.8ghz, just the Antec 920 couldnt keep up cooling it.

Now since I got the H100i I need to test more.
 
Get the H110 and some Noctua iPPC fans. Even at 1.4V and running 4.5GHz my 4930K doesn't break 75C when running Prime95. (to be fair I installed 7x 140mm + 3x 120mm case fans, so my case is basically a windbox lol)

Oh and btw my Gigabyte cards arrived today, both are rev 1.0, and consecutive serial #s too. Hopefully they'll play nice together.
 
DASHlT said:
Yea its on. I can hit 4.8ghz, just the Antec 920 couldnt keep up cooling it.

Now since I got the H100i I need to test more.
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What voltage do you need to be stable at 4.8? Not to sidetrack the thread too much... :)

I needed 1.425V for stable at 4.6. I don't care to go up much more. 1.35V was stable for 4.5... V required seems to increase rapidly. I don't go above 70C. The h100i should do just fine...
 
Velgus said:
Everything's been stable for me so far, 3DMark, Unigine Valley and Heaven, Catzilla, Furmark, Tomb Raider bench, Hitman:Absolution bench, Bioshock Infinite bench, and additionally playing several hours of each a heavily modded Skyrim and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

I honestly think this card is capable of so much more, but there seems to be some throttling issues and driver crash issues caused by the current drivers/BIOS (some people were talking about it much earlier in this thread). I get those issues if I bump my voltage 'at all' with my current overclock settings. That said, it's pretty great that even at maximum stress, this card barely hits 60 degrees C.

I somehow got 98.6 on Tomb Raider bench (also Ultimate Settings). Yours seems a bit low, did you change the anti-aliasing to x4 MSAA or the Shadow settings? For Ultimate it sets mine to FXAA and Medium shadows.

I didn't record my 'proper/unmodified' Shadow of Mordor bench (and I'm a bit too lazy to remove SweetFX at the moment), but I think it was about 86-88 for me when I did do it originally.

I'd definitely give pushing the card a go. And my CPU isn't a very good overclocker, I'm on air cooling and I can't get it stable higher than 4.4GHz without setting the voltage and temperature outside my comfort zone.

You can see some of my other benchmark results here.
Click to expand...

Yeah for Tomb Raider, I did two separate benches. This was on the Ultimate setting it does:
Min: 58.1
Max: 62
Average 60

And with EVERYTHING set as high as possible:
Min: 29.1
Max: 60.1
Average: 42

So, quite a bit lower. What do you game at, 1080 or higher? I'm at 1080.

Edit: So I've been at +180/+475 for hours and hours. I tried to raise the memory, and it keeps going back down to 475 on its own.. Won't let me raise it, what the hell?
 
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Dayaks said:
What voltage do you need to be stable at 4.8? Not to sidetrack the thread too much... :)

I needed 1.425V for stable at 4.6. I don't care to go up much more. 1.35V was stable for 4.5... V required seems to increase rapidly. I don't go above 70C. The h100i should do just fine...
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1.3v for 4.6ghz right now.
 
Just installed my 2x Gigabyte 970s, ASIC is 62.9% and 64.6%, so both are kinda crappy but at least they're close I guess.

Haven't had time to play around with it yet but just noticed that voltage control in AB is grayed out! :eek:

Nearly had a heart attack when I saw that but thankfully voltage can still be adjusted with nVInspector. Anybody know what's up with that? Running driver 344.11 and the latest version of AB (v4.0.0.4604).
 
n=1 said:
Just installed my 2x Gigabyte 970s, ASIC is 62.9% and 64.6%, so both are kinda crappy but at least they're close I guess.

Haven't had time to play around with it yet but just noticed that voltage control in AB is grayed out! :eek:

Nearly had a heart attack when I saw that but thankfully voltage can still be adjusted with nVInspector. Anybody know what's up with that? Running driver 344.11 and the latest version of AB (v4.0.0.4604).
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Settings -> General -> Unlock Voltage Control in MSI Afterburner. I believe that just sets the Windows Registry setting which unlocks voltage control for many Nvidia cards. I sent my card back to Newegg or I would double check this for you.
 
LOL yeah right after I posted that I figured it out. I guess my brain stopped working after all that adrenaline rushed to my head

Btw both cards are rev 1.0 and have the same BIOS version 84.04.1F.00.62 (P04 B-oard)

Hopefully I'll get some time to play with these this week.
 
r4G5bPj.png

Running well at +190/+475 now.. But I still can't get the memory above +475, it just slides right back to +475 when I try to change it and apply the changes. Tomb Raider still gave me an average FPS of 60.0 on Ultimate settings (The Ultimate setting itself, no changes).
 
n=1 said:
LOL yeah right after I posted that I figured it out. I guess my brain stopped working after all that adrenaline rushed to my head

Btw both cards are rev 1.0 and have the same BIOS version 84.04.1F.00.62 (P04 B-oard)

Hopefully I'll get some time to play with these this week.
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Interesting how I have a totally different bios.

84.04.1F.00.B3 (P04 B-oard)
84.04.1F.00.B4 (P04 B-oard)
 
DASHlT said:
Interesting how I have a totally different bios.

84.04.1F.00.B3 (P04 B-oard)
84.04.1F.00.B4 (P04 B-oard)
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Bought my Gigabyte 970 G1 on September 30 and I've got the B3 bios.

My card does 1543 MHz core and 3903 MHz memory (+125/400) at 1.243v (+87mv).

Any higher and I get artifacts. I've been able to bench at 1580 core though. Was able to get to 4001 MHz memory, but I noticed some textures not loading in BF4.
 
Fuck my 970's have absolutely horrible coil whine, actually more a static "buzz" than whine, but Ice Storm makes them buzz like crazy, as does 3DMark11. Valley seems to be a bit better, but definitely an audible buzz. I guess I should add I don't have the speakers connected atm, and both side panels are off. Really hoping the buzz will be inaudible once I put the panels back on and turn up the volume, otherwise I may have to RMA these. Dammit :(

Hoping to get Sleeping Dogs installed so I can at least see how bad the buzz is in games otherwise I won't be able to sleep tonight. Argh!

And my master card runs 10C hotter than slave during Valley. Is this normal or should I check the paste?

P.S. HWInfo64 reports the video chipset as GTX 870 lol
 
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n=1 said:
Fuck my 970's have absolutely horrible coil whine, actually more a static "buzz" than whine, but Ice Storm makes them buzz like crazy, as does 3DMark11. Valley seems to be a bit better, but definitely an audible buzz. I guess I should add I don't have the speakers connected atm, and both side panels are off. Really hoping the buzz will be inaudible once I put the panels back on and turn up the volume, otherwise I may have to RMA these. Dammit :(

Hoping to get Sleeping Dogs installed so I can at least see how bad the buzz is in games otherwise I won't be able to sleep tonight. Argh!

And my master card runs 10C hotter than slave during Valley. Is this normal or should I check the paste?

P.S. HWInfo64 reports the video chipset as GTX 870 lol
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Yea my top card does run hotter then the bottom. How SLI and crossfire works :/.

Sucks about the coil while though. I guess I got lucky.
 
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