Has anybody overclocked a GTX 670

[Mark3Max]

I have a Evga gtx 670 + and have tried a few times to overclock it . Last night I tried using Afterburner , bumped the power limit to 110% and the clock core to +150 and it crashed right after starting Heaven 4. Has anyone had any luck overclocking an Nvidia card ?
I've checked to see if I had any power saving enabled , maybe I missed something. I think I have a bad card , it gets kind of warm , about 63 degrees C under load on stock settings.

 

[SparkleDJackson]

my experience with my ftws is that they are hot and loud. even at stock. to overclock properly it though you are going to have the up the power target more than that im at 145% 130+ core 500+ mem at 150 i had artifacting so i took it back to 130 which i was happy with which i believe give me a max of 1350 core clock and about 7.2ghz mem. cos you multiply the displayed clock (36xx) by 2 to give you the actual clock. i might be wrong, infact im probably wrong some one more in the know with kepler clocking will correct that but everything else i said at least in my case worked i have them watercooled now so they dont hit 50 but before they would get unbelieveably hot super fast

 

[Mark3Max]

Thanks for the reply,
I had the evga software and used the K boost and got a 1175 out of it . But I've been reading up on Afterburner and it's supposed to be better, So I thought I would try a mild overclock to no avail. Yeah they do get hot fast , I still don't like the blower type fan on these cards.
My new card (MSI GTX680 Lightning) should be here Monday. I really wanted a 7970 lightning , but I think everyone is buying them up.

 

[jamesriley94]

My experience with 670 clocks hasn't been great.
My EVGA FTW only manages like a 95mhz increase - but don't forget, it is factory overclocked already.

My old KFA2 one only managed about 80mhz increase iirc - again, already factory overclocked.

Just don't expect too much.

 

[Mark3Max]

Thanks for the reply James,
Yeah I guess the FTW cards aren't really that bad , I probably did expect a little too much . I started reading online what others where getting from their (stock) 670's and thought maybe I could get more out of it , but as you said , they are already factory overclocked . I think the main thing I really don't like about them is they do run a little warm. It seems to me like once it gets mid 60's C it starts to throttle back some. I think I'm about to try my first case mod and cut the grill out of the front 200mm of my case to help airflow a bit.

 

[Mysterae]

One of the best guides I have found is this one here.

According to the post the key is keeping your 670 under 70c to prevent throttling, and to understand how the boost works.

The post describes using Precision-X as the tool to overclock and that's what I used, (before that Afterburner). Be careful of the EVGA K-Boost function, it has it's good and bad sides. The good is that it keeps the maximum voltage (1.175v) on at all times, but this is useless when your not gaming; it just increases temps and fans. For example both gpus are sat at 71c and 64c AT IDLE with fans doing what they want on auto (44% and 38% respectively) with Precision-x closed. Not a good pratice. To disable the K-Boost you have to disable SLI then reboot the system. No good if you are jumping out of game, browse or do something productive, then game again. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if on water, apart from the added power consumption and potential wear on the gpu.

My two EVGA 670 SC 4gb models have been great performers but not so at getting any further gains on the boost - they just get too hot. When overclocking with fans at the max 80% and all case fans at 100% (in a FT02 no less) the cards still reach 75c during Unigine Valley. The noise is stupid so I'm going water cooling next month, but that's another subject.

I haven't tried the cards individually, but together I can get a gpu offset of 52 but nothing on the memory to be stable, or a gpu offset of 30 and a memory offset of 400 stable! I stopped trying to get any higher than that on the memory as I'll revisit the overclocking when I do eventually get them under water.

 

[Mark3Max]

Thanks for the reply Mysterae,
I have read that article , although it says a GTX 670 guide the graphs state a 680.
Not exactly sure how much difference that makes , but the article is pretty informative.
I had Precision-x to start with and with K-boost on the card did run a bit warm, so I tried a manual overclock with K-boost off and I couldn't get close to the K-boost overclock speed. I then uninstalled P-X and tried afterburner and got the same results . I guess I need more knowledge and experience doing this.
I'll keep looking for your post when you watercool your cards. Good luck

 

[NRG!]

Afterburner and precision x both use rivatuner to fiddle with the gpu so they're essentially the same thing.

Your new lightning may not overclock much at all. It comes at 1202 stock boost out of the box. Mine would clock to 1267 and 1253 on stock volts.

To overvolt them you need to install the older LN2 bios and use afterburner 2.2.3. Apparently nvidia's current drivers have also broken overvolting, although I haven't checked this yet. Without overvolting the lightnings aren't anything special for the price.

 

[Mark3Max]

Hi NGR! ,
What graphics drivers are you running on your lightning ?
Yeah I have a link saved for the July 2012 LN2 bios , but I think I might have to use the 306.?? driver with it to get it to work right.

 

[NRG!]

I'm on the latest before the one that was just released for crysis 3.

But I haven't had the inclination to over volt since updating drivers as I'm supposed to be studying, lol.