Overclocking My GTX 960

Discussion in 'MSI AfterBurner Application Development Forum' started by Jeff George, Feb 20, 2018.

  1. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    I've tried a number of forums and gotten only chirping crickets, even to a simple question such as 'is the is the right place to be asking this question?' Since this forum seems dedicated to Afterburner hopefully my luck will be a bit better.

    First of all, is this the right to ask for guidance regarding overclocking with Afterburner?

    Secondly, if so, I must be doing something wrong, because I cannot seem to get any decent performance out of my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 with 2 GB RAM. I've watched numerous videos and read numerous guides and my card just doesn't seem to want to do anything. I have an Intel i7 quad core dual threaded processor with 8GB of RAM. I feel that I should be able to get more than 30 FPS in a mediocre piece of software will all graphics set to minimum. Any advice or guidance would be appreciated.
     
  2. CalculuS

    CalculuS Ancient Guru

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    Ok first off, I want to get the rookie mistakes out of the way.

    Post a picture where your monitor cable is plugged into your pc.
     
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  3. EdKiefer

    EdKiefer Ancient Guru

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    need more info like what your stock clocks are and what your trying to OC to.
    remember something like 10% is about all your get, so if you see 30 now, you maybe see 33, that's if all goes well and the game is GPU bound.
     
  4. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    Is it possible to attach an image without a URL? The cable is plugged into the DVI port on the card. I have a photo but don't have anywhere to upload it.
     

  5. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    My real concern is that the card is malfunctioning and I don't know how to determine that. I don't think I should be seeing 30 FPS to begin with. A friend and I did a test where we played the same game with the same graphic settings. My NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 was averaging 33 FPS. His AMD r270 was averaging 113 FPS. That makes no sense. I also notice that fans on my card are not spinning. Should they always be spinning, or only running when necessary?
     
  6. CalculuS

    CalculuS Ancient Guru

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    Alright that seems to exclude the first rookie mistake where people plug their monitor to their on-board graphics instead of graphics card.

    Have you plugged both pcie cables into the gpu?

    While in a game can you check with msi afterburner if theres GPU usage and if the clocks are going to boost clocks?
     
  7. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    According to Afterburner, for the tests I'm running I am maxing out at 99% GPU usage, 70 degrees C, and 80% fan utilization. I made a setting change in the NVIDIA Control Panel to set Power Management Mode to 'Prefer Maximum Performance' and the test average 44 FPS this time. Better, but still sub-par to my friend's 113. How can I tell if the card itself is dying, if such a thing is even possible.

    I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean by plugging both pcie cables in.
     
  8. norton

    norton Master Guru

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    where did you got that gtx 960 because some scammers sells fake GPUs (usually gts 450 with modified bios) on eBay , i hope you didn't got it from there
    check this

     
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2018
  9. Andy_K

    Andy_K Master Guru

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    ouch, that would be bad.

    I had a R7 270X and changed to a GTX 960 and in every game i got more FPS. Even if in some Benchmarks the R7 270X maybe on the same level in real games the GTX 960 is always better.
    So if your GTX 960 is not performing any near your friends R7 270 than your card is faulty or a scam.

    PS: after watching the video, use GPU-Z and have a look.
    • ROPs/TMUs must be 32/64
    • Shaders should be 1024
    • DirectX Support should be 12(12_1)
    • enabled Checkbox for DirectCompute 5.0
    The displayed info should be like this:
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2018
  10. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    Mine report basically corresponds to yours except less RAM and slightly more GPU Clock and Boost. Maybe the card is doing what it's supposed to. I found that the game I was using to test was 'Optimized' by NVIDIA Experience, but was showing a resolution of 2096x or something like that, which my monitor doesn't even support. I'm wondering if that had something to do with the low performance compared to my friend's test.
     

  11. CalculuS

    CalculuS Ancient Guru

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    Could you check if DSR is set on in the geforce experience panel for any of your games?

    I don't know where its located exactly since it has been a while since I had a nvidia card but that would explain a lot.
     
  12. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    I didn't find DSR in the GeForce Experience, but I did find it in the NVIDIA Control Panel. There are 2 global settings: one is DSR - Factors, set to '2.00x (native resolution), and there is DSR - Smoothness, set to 33%. Based on the descriptions I'm thinking that a global setting of DSR - Factors of 2x may not be a good idea.
     
  13. CalculuS

    CalculuS Ancient Guru

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    You are most certainly right. Set it to 1x.

    I'm assuming you are on a 1080p screen so if you use DSR x2 all your games will be rendered in 2160p.

    And yes that would explain why your poor 960 is crapping itself.
     
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  14. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    Sounds like a plan! I'll test it when I get home. An update (or me) or something must've changed that and that would be why I suddenly felt I was losing performance across the board. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! I'll report back, hopefully with a success story.
     
  15. Andy_K

    Andy_K Master Guru

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    You don't have to disable DSR factors, just make sure to select the right resolution (1920x1080) ingame and it will run fine.

    DSR is used to get better image quality and reduce texture flickering by rendering the game in a much higher resolution (if selected ingame!) than your monitor is capable and the driver will reduce it to your monitors native resolution thus smoothing out zigzag lines and texture flickering.
    In actual games the 960 GTX is to little to get useful fps with it.
    With some older games or games which are not so demanding (FPS>120) which maybe even don't support proper AA other than FXAA you can get really good results using DSR resolutions ingame: pimping up the quality and still get more than 60 fps.
    To be honest I only use it for older games which on max settings still produce more than 120fps.
     
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  16. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    The lowest I could set DSR was 1.2x so I just turned it off completely. I gained no improvement in framerate.
     
  17. EdKiefer

    EdKiefer Ancient Guru

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    Go into your game's option and make sure its res is set to 1920x1080 , also if there is a scaling setting make sure its only 100%.
     
  18. Jeff George

    Jeff George Guest

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    The game I'm using for testing does not have a scaling setting but the resolution is set to 1920x1080. I'm astounded that disabling DSR didn't get me any improvement. I just don't understand what could be crippling the framerate on this system.
     
  19. Caesar

    Caesar Ancient Guru

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    Hi Jeff,
    please note that GTX 960 2GB is 128bit Memory Interface compared to your friend's R270 which is 256 bit.

    And have not speak about your RAM (how much ).......... CPU ........... and which game you are testing. (because i had an MSI GTX 960 OC - GTX-960-2GD5T-OC and i got 22 FPS with Call of duty modern Warfare remastered [ 12GB RAM + i5 3470]

    there are many factors which affects the framerates.
     
  20. Andy_K

    Andy_K Master Guru

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    As I mentioned before, activating DSR in the driver doesn't affect the FPS at all, as long as you don't set a higher resolution than 1920x1080 in the game. Therefore, there is no performance gain if you turn off DSR and have already set 1920x1080 in the game before.

    To be able to analyze this better we would need more information about your system (CPU + RAM @Frequency?) as well as about the used game respectively which benchmark you are using.
     

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