I bought my msi gtx 970 a few months ago (this is my first graphics card and my warranty is still valid) and I can over clock to 1500MHz without crashing however it has very noticeable artifacting in games (mainly red and blue marks in gta and black marks in other games like modded skyrim). so because of this I cant overclock over about 1424MHz without artifacts.
Is this a card fault and can I return it?? ( I bought it at a local pc shop called CCL, it's like Ncix but a bit smaller)
But if this isn't replaceable can I get more performance by watercooling?? Considering I'm using the max in voltage afterburner.
Thx.
I have 8GB of 2400MHz RAM
a 4690k Oc to 4.6GHz
and a msi gaming 5 mobo (z97)
Artifacting is a very normal limiting factor of overclocking, if you send it back they will return the same card to you, warranty covers stock clocks nothing more. normally artifacting can be remedied by lowering temperatures, by giving the electricity less resistance its less likely to leak (causing miscalculations thus artifacting) so yes water cooling will give you a tad more headroom. I should note a 970 will not pass 1500 stable without a custom bios so is water cooling it worth s potential 75mhz more? Up to you. Is the warranty worth voiding with a new bios for maybe just maybe another 50-100mhz past that and shortening the life of your chip? Again up to you.
just dont overclock it, it doesnt help that much on gpus anyway. gpus are more about the amount of cuda cores and memory bandwidth than frequency and you cant change that only buy a better one. If you have to overclock something, overclock your cpu
Overclocking a gpu will only yield ~5 frames. It isn't worth the extra heat output and power consumption unless you have a custom loop or something like a Kraken G10 with an AIO
I recently bought a 970 myself, but the msi 100 me. These are the stable settings I get in afterburner. I tried +225 and +200 on the core voltage but I was getting the same artifacts that you mentioned. +175 works well for me, and if you have the msi gaming card, I read online that +150 on the core is about right for it.
I can tell you right now this is 100% false unless the 1500 is a typo that should be 1600 instead. My 970 and many other 970's have already surpassed 1500 (and not by a small margin) on their stock bioses. For instance my 970 (stock bios) can do 1600 core on its stock bios and Jaystwocents' 970 did 1529 on the core.
@TomBom10B As others have stated it's just a normal limiting OC'ing factor and since you said you cannot pass 1424 at max voltage you just have a bad overclocker. It just happens. And as others have already stated it's not returnable as warranty only covers the listed specs, no more.
it wasn't a typo, there are cherry picked exceptions of course. those exceptions being 1525-1550 at most in rare cases I have never heard of 1600 on stock bios.
That's just it though, I have seen so many 970's surpass 1500 that it's not really an exception.
Relating back to my post and some others, with the overclock I posted above, I am at 1541 stable. Temperature or power aren't a limiting factor for me, just artifacting.
As @SoulFallen said, articulating us caused by an increase in resistance in the circuitry leading to errors in calculations. There are two things you can do to give you more head room, reduce the temperature to reduce resistance or increase voltage which in turn will increase heat and wear but will give you more headroom. In reality, you have reached the limit of your gpu, pull back to stop articulating and reduce risk to your card. Contrary to what some people are saying, there is value in overclocking but you reach a point when improvements diminish and your best ether getting a second card or a new card rather than watercool your card considering most people forget there is more than the gpu to keep an eye on when overclocking but also memory temps and vrm.
simply you lost silicon lottery.
Overclocking is allways a matter of luck, i never understand why reviewers keep talking about this with gpu´s in general.
1 Like
I haven't found the stopping point for my vram oc i can get it to like 650+ with nothing seeming wrong.
so what happens when u oc ur vram too high??
if the vram is clocked too high it will cause green/blue/gray any color of the rainbow screen crashes of games or the frame will freeze while everything is still running. There's other things that can happen but that's what's most common.
Also I don't recommend OC'ing your VRAM balls to the wall since you can easily brick your card with a too aggressive OC. Since you say you can do +650 without any issues then I recommend running it with +500 24/7. It's a lot safer
What oc one can get to be stable depends on how you went in the silicon lottery. Just cause someone (website review etc) gets an oc of 1500+ doesnt mean your card can. + what memory is on the gpu - hynix, elpida...
Watercooling wont help.
Overclock the correct way, and be gentle unless you have a spare gpu and really like the RMA process.
If you're curious to see how good of a gpu you have - right clock the gpu-z left hand corner - read ASIC value.