First time Overclocking MSI GTX 970 Help.

EpicSurvivor

Golden Member
Aug 14, 2012
1,044
48
91
Does anyone have a basic copy and paste guide on how to Overclock an MSI GTX 970? I've never Overclocked this card before but heard great things about it.

If signature Reads EVGA its MSI. I will fix this when MoBo comes from RMA. On mobile for now.
 

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,699
1,448
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I understand what you're asking. You need to do some web searches to get a short-cut to a stable overclock.

Here's one, for instance, in a HardOCP review:

GTX 970 overclocking
You are obviously advised to use MSI's AfterBurner, but they all work.

I had two of them in SLI with a stable overclock. I think we upped the voltage by 2%. With the second step, you move the slider for the GPU core from its original (STOCK!) setting in 25 or 50 Mhz intervals. All this time, you're testing it with a Benchmark like Unigine Valley, and hopefully, only the video driver crashes and recovers, so that you don't blue-screen the system -- but such things are hard to avoid. You can only minimize their occurrence by doing thorough homework.

I cannot remember my final core stress speed, but that information is "out there" and you can find it. After that, you can up the memory clock, and some people were claiming stability at either 4,500 Mhz or 9,000 Mhz depending on whether or not you're talking about double-data rate. [Coming back for review: Read on, because these numbers are probably confused with my GTX 1070].

Hold on a minute . . . I'd removed one of the GTX 970s from the system but left my Afterburner installed with settings, so I can give you an idea . . .

. . . . OK . . . Yeah . . . . So -- correction. I got the parameters and variables confused with GTX 1070 OC'ing. It isn't a matter of setting the voltage up "2%," but upping it to what I remember as a a recommended limit of 20 mV. The slider is divided into increments of millivolts.

Raise the power limit to 110% -- which is likely a maximum.

I found my MSI GTX 970 core overclock around +150. My stable memory overclock was +250. Still, I can't even remember what the overall core and memory stress speeds were . . . wait-a-minute . . . OK . . . yeah . . .

People were trying to reach 1,500 Mhz core and 8,000 memory (or 4,000 depending on how you look at it). If this is an indication of my 2x SLI accomplishment, my core would peak to 1,478 and memory to 3,758 (or roughly 7,500 -- depending) . . .