Hello guys, once again, I need your help. I have a GTX 960 Strix OC 2GB which maintains good temps - 54C while idling and MAX 70C while Crysis 3 although it does not crash, even though it's OC'd to 1488Mhz Core and 3996Mhz Mem My problem is that with certain games (ME2, FC3, Sleeping Dogs) the card throttles to 540mhz Core and 3004Mhz Mem. ME2 does not crash but lags, but FC3 just crashes, same with Sleeping dogs. Watch Dogs and every other game runs fine. When I open GPU-Z, everything looks fine except the clocks, which are lowered. The temps are always below 70C, but then, why does it throttle if the temps are low? I am certainly not in the danger zone. Also I tried overvolting it to 1.212v but no change. Also the games show no artifacts, glitches or whatever. FurMark runs rock solid. Valley runs perfect and Firestrike has low FPS but fine. Do you think it's my temps, which I can resolve by adding some fans, or my voltage, which I cannot increase anymore, causing the problem?
Oh. Just did a small experiment, I set the GPU fan to 100% and now it's stable from and hour. Will continue testing. I have narrowed it down to cooling issues then.
Yeah, already done that along with Power Target (115% also tried with lower levels). Now I am thinking to fill more holes and daisy-chain multiple fans and connect them to molex for full speed and sadly, mobo only supported 1 fan. Getting 2 more fans. Sadly, there's no waterblock available for this GPU. I'm not much into water-cooling though, as I'm just not too experienced with case mods. <== LOL have some pity on this 8th grader. (13 yrs).
The overclock is too high. It would be more sense knocking back the GPU and Mem OC and see how things go then, rather than playing around with cooling. Even if your card was kept cool, and it was stable, having such a high overclock could potentially shorten the lifespan of the card. The default settings for the card, which are already overclocked, are 1291 MHz for the GPU and 1317 MHz for the memory. Yes they seem a bit random, but that is from the Asus website. Not sure about that 3996 MHz on your GPU memory.
I would listen to this guy if I was you. Also setting FAN Speed to 100% shortens the fans lifespan. Just tone down the overclock... If your overclock was safe it would make sense to mess about with the cooling, but it seems like your overclock is definitely not stable. If you need 100% fan speed all the time, that's not good.
Gpu clock prob fine alright, maxwell cards are capable of very high clocks on air, I bet the vrams are clocked too high. stock vram speed is 7ghz, oc its at 8ghz.