Unpredictable OC Asus 780

[Chasp_0]

Unpredictable OC Asus 780 Advice

Hey team.....well I am at a loss so im reaching out to the people!

I have an Asus Direct CU2 780, its a lovely card and has exceeded my expectations BUT.... i'm toying around with overclocking and I cant for the life of me get the thing to behave.
Im using windows 7 64bit and playing with msi afterburner btw...

An observation I have made since owning this card is idle clock since the beginning of ownership is 888mhz

So I have done all the normal things, increase temp,power,voltage limits in afterburner and then try to creep the core clock up but no matter what i pick if its +10 or +150 on the core it will go up to this value for an unpredictable amount of time then just fall back to 1006mhz. Also if i pick +110 it will go to 1150 then back to 1008 but then i have to input +150 to make it jump to 1150 and it will fall back to the same 1008mhz. If its relevant I have folding@home going while doing this so the card is loaded and I can adjust things and see if its being applied. I have tried it with benches running and its 100% the same unpredictable results

Last night I updated to the most recent driver and I noticed then that at idle my card fell to around 370mhz and would boost to whatever i told it to, I ran folding, valley, heaven, occt, all the things and holy crap it was working 1150mhz totally fine, temps good, zero issues.
I went to bed and today with no changes its back to its old tricks.
Unfortunately I was too stoked with the change I didn't pay attention to voltages ect like a noob but as I said its back to its old tricks.

I have removed/reinstalled afterburner, Nvidia drivers ect (through their regular uninstallers) several times and once again today but no change....

Please guys im going to be here all day and I would really appreciate your thoughts and input on just what the hell is going on, I know this card is capable of more and I have witnessed it working as I feel it should
If you need any extra information just let me know

 

[Chasp_0]

I would be keen to hear from anyone who has a similar 780 with the newer 80.80 bios, im pretty sure thats whats gimping me, maybe the power limit or overall tdp has been nerfed and thats why my card just wants to stay at 1008 mhz.
I may or may not have flashed another bios on and now it works like I would expect and has decent OC numbers and pretty normal voltages so I dont think the whole "GPU boost is doing what it can with your average chip" arguement stands up, it was just giving me a meager amount of extra oomph before capping at some arbitrary asus standard that I find to be much too conservative

 

[Warchild]

One of my 780s is a horrible overclocker too. Unfortunately since I went SLI, due to the behaviour of my EVGA card I have both running at stock for piece of mind. I really didn't see the worth in flashing the bios to improve it, when it was such a bad OC on default bios.

If its 888mhz at idle however, it could be you have a data mining malware?

Also, careful about double posting, even if its a considerable time inbetween posts. Its frowned upon with these forums. You might want to edit your main post and just add the date/time to signify updates to your OP

 

[Chasp_0]

Ah thanks for the warning, duly noted
With the new bios i can manually set 1.9 or 1.2v and then happily go up to 1150mhz, iv heard of stock cards that are alot worse (its a 780 its not THAT bad ) but now without this stock bios it seems like a half decent card that is behaving within all sane voltage/temp/power limits. Iv'e only had the bios for a day so im curious to see how far it will go on 1.2v

(Update 3 hours later) Well people I think i have it sussed....there appears to be some kind of conflict between my asus 780 DCU2 and asus AI suite .
With the vga cooling set to manual fan curve or my choosing this was causing random spikes in MSI afterburner, these wouldnt really cause the fans to speed up but showed up as large spikes on the readout.
For whatever reason this was causing the settings in MSI AB to revert to stock clocks and any further adjustments as soon as I clicked apply the spike in the fan speed readout would happen. Not entirely convinced I set a fixed speed in the manual curve and it seemed to be fine except occasionally there would be these random spikes thus causing the nerfing of performance.
I put it to auto mode and restarted and viola its working perfectly 1202mhz @ 1.2 at 75c
Only took about 12 hours to figure out but it seems to have fixed it....
(2 asus products not working together lol)