MSI Afterburner is all you need to overclock. I would suggest undervolting first to find your cards lowest at stock core clocks. Then just edge up the core clock and voltage accordingly whilst keeping a careful eye on temperatures and testing stability. The Heaven Benchmark is quite good for that. Also just managed a tentative overclock of 940MHz at 1138mV. Not fully tested yet but I did get it through Heaven Benchmark for a single run. Still on the old Enermax 400W, seems to be dealing okay at the moment. It was just FurMark that put it out of whack with ridiculous power draw! Also £164.98 on SCAN for an EVGA GTX 480 at the time of writing... http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1536...r-1401mhz-480-cores-2x-dual-link-dvi-i-mini-h
I'm not exactly sure what's happened or what's wrong, but I think I may have balls'd my 480 a bit. Tried overclocking it tonight and was tempted to just whack the volts and clocks up and go for it, but my overly clenched sphincter wouldn't allow it. First run 725@1v did 5mins in furmark fine and a pass at heaven too. Max temp on heaven was 53 Pushed it up to 750@1.013v(stock), passed 5 min furmark run, set heaven off just as my mum got back from seeing my gran for a few days, so went to help with the bags. Got chattin for a bit and then remembered what I was doing and returned to a frozen screen. Restarted the PC and windows loaded up fine, went to check the gpuz log only to find i hadn't had it running (not that it should have gone up THAT much from the previous run), so figured it may have just needed a bit more juice. Loaded up firefox and it froze again. Tried a few resets, but whenever i treid loading a page with pics on or launching a vid it froze. Totally miffed i went back downstairs. I've come back now a couple of hours later and all seems well now, so i'm totally puzzled!
I did but turned it off when started having the problems. But it's ok I've found out what was happening now, my nb was just leaking a bit into the pci-e slot........ ..... ... . AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!! (insert chubby brown 10 most used non racial words here) Just had to do an emergency op on her. Poured most of the coolant all over me, fortunately I did't spill any on anything electronic. It's a tiny leak that's just dripped off the block and hit where the gfx goes into the pci slot. I only noticed it ass took the card out to put my 460 back in. Went to give the 480 a sniff for any burning smell when and got something wet on my nose, then I realised I'd got some liquid on my fingers from somewhere and that somewhere was not good. Must have knocked/loosened it yesterday when I had a problem with trapped air pushin the cpu temp past a ton. Not been then best couple of days
Yeh it's currently spread across the floor. I was going to leave it for a while to dry before refitting.would/should I use anymore more than a lint free cloth to clean it with?
Alright boys! I'm in! SLI 480's with full EK blocks idling at 30C at stock. Furmark test and some OCing on its way shortly.
Nice work Parge, ain't water cooling a dream! I just flashed my GTX 480 BIOS to unlock some additional voltage. The stock maximum was 1138mV, now with the modified BIOS I can bump it up to 1213mV. I might also adjust the stock minimum so from boot it'll be 925mV, currently the unstressed voltage is above this at 963mV. Unnecessary for my GTX 480!
Yes it is! I'm topping out at 51C in Furmark - though that is with the fans cranked. Going to find a nice compromise now. Edit: Without sounding like a turbine I'm at 65C with Prime 95 and Furmark running at 1600p. Now for some Overclocking. Since I'm running SLI, if I use afterburner to OC, will it adjust the Core speeds of both cards, or only one?
GTX 480 proved not at all stable beyond 1138mV! At the time of writing I'm testing an overclock of 935MHz at 1138mV as 940MHz proved unstable in the end.
Ok. I've not played around with extra volts yet, but I'm up to 900Mhz stable on the core. Has anyone hit 950?
For SLI you need to go in to MSI Afterburner settings and tick the box for 'Synchronize settings for similar graphics processors'.
That's excellent! My safe limit appears to be 920MHz with 1100mV. At the moment everything else above this limit falters given enough time. I thought it might be my Enermax 400W PSU but I'm experiencing worse results now I just switched to an Enermax 850W PSU. Go figure!
might that be because the 400w couldn't give it as much power as it should have been and now you've got the 850W on it's too much for it to handle?
Ok so after extensive testing I've found that my 900mhz OC is totally stable in Furkmark, but not stable in BF3 which crashes after an hour or so. However, 875 Mhz is totally stable, so I'm going to up it to 885 during the week and see how I get on. I've spoken to Chris_Waddle (the previous owner) and he says he has had it stable at 890 on stock volts. They aren't getting above 50C in games, so temp isn't the issue, and it must need more voltage. Oh and the 850w PSU is handling it all with aplomb. It gets a little warm during games, but certainly not hot.
With the smallest increase in voltage the result is a massive increase in draw from the mains with the GTX 480! I found 925mV was a little skittish in the end so upped it to 938mV and all my testing has proven stable so far at 700MHz on the core. This also keeps my PSU happy and cool since the power draw is so much less when under volted.
I am LOVING the 480's in BF3. My 570 struggled at medium at 1600p but now I get 60fps almost constantly in High/Ultra. Do get the occassional random dip (I guess running out of vRAM) to the high 30s but other than that, wow! The extra shader power really does make a difference, and FXAA is a huge help.
