this is my titan test bench and this is the titan overclocking guide
overclocking titan is very different from previous generation GeForce
products due to the way that GPU boost 2
is implemented compared to GPU boost 1. so first let's show you the test bench
really quickly here we've got 16 gigs of mushkin copperhead memory it's kind of
hiding here don't worry too much about it a 4.4 gigahertz 3770k processor under
an h100 we've also got a maximus 5 formula motherboard from ASUS GeForce
gtx titan of course we'll need one of those and our benchmark of choice
although it's not we're not really using it for benchmarking purposes is crisis
too so we're using this as our stability test and we're using evga precision as
the overclocking utility now GPU boost 2
differs from GPU boost 1 in one primary
way instead of relying on okay GPU
voltage GPU clock speed and the power
target for the board itself GPU boost 2
relies on the clock speed the
voltage and the temperature of the GPU because
what kills video cards in the long term what kills a processor in the long term
is voltage and temperatures over time so
if NVIDIA knows that oh okay well that end user is controlling the temperature
they don't have to account for it being sort of a worst case scenario so
what we see here in evga precision if we can actually open it there we go is the
configuration that i'm using now this graphics card right here is supposed to
deliver uh sort of a an 867 megahertz
boost clock however without changing anything because we're in a relatively
cool room this GPU was running at nearly one gigahertz before we even changed the
offset that's because the temperatures were under control so i'm going to come
in here i'm going to show you how i would overclock a titan
or any video card using GPU boost too because you can change your fan speed
curve okay so come in and have a look at what we can do to the fan curve so i
would start with the fan curve and i'd say okay
i am willing to accept the noise level of a 70 fan as a worst case scenario so
i'd take that 70 percent and i'd put that up near the temperature target that
i'm gonna set the fan speed is very related to the temperature target so i
go okay yeah the temperature target's going to be 80
degrees or 85 or 90 degrees and i'm willing to tolerate this fan speed okay
now you know that that's your worst case scenario that is how your fan is going
to ramp up so that's going to determine your maximum so then what you do
is you go in and you go okay well voltage wise i would just crank it up
because it doesn't really matter because
the GPU will change its voltage
as much as it wants to but it won't go too far because the temperature is going
to hold it back before it's going to apply more voltage to itself so it'll
actually keep voltage under control on its own so i just kind of crank that up
then the next step is i would start to play around with the power target so
power target i just turn up to the max and you can link or unlink the temp
target in the power target set a temperature target you're comfortable
with this is where some of that customization comes in so i could set a
fan curve that goes okay i want to keep the fan speed low and i'm okay with
higher temperatures i understand that that's going to make the GPU clock
itself down and lower its voltage sometimes but that's that's a compromise
that i'm comfortable with or you can go okay temperature target
70 degrees fan speed set a very
aggressive curve and that way you can actually keep those temperatures low and
the GPU will fight to stay there again by sort of ramping up voltage and
ramping up frequency as much as it can but then backing off if that temperature
starts to go up so playing around with the power target and the temperature
target as well as the fan curves and the voltage is all somewhat related once
you've set those up the way that you want them so in my case i set a fan
curve that had it ramping up to i think i have a temperature target of 90
degrees i'm willing to tolerate that and i played around with the fan speeds
manually and i said okay you know what 65
is about as loud as i can tolerate so i set that curve and then i made it much
more aggressive so it's a very gradual ramp up until
then and then once we hit that 90 degrees i'm going to say okay fan go
ahead and go crazy to bring yourself back down here if that's what it takes
then what you start to do is play around with the GPU clock offset make sure
you're monitoring because you could set a GPU clock offset of 300 megahertz but
at the end of the day if the voltage if the temperature is
being exceeded or it needs too much voltage to get there it sees the power
targets or whatever other limiting factors come into play your GPU
might not actually be clocking itself up that high so you need to make sure that
you're popping out of your application that you're using to test your overclock
and making sure that it's actually even running at a higher frequency so you
turn those up until you either run into stability issues or you notice that the
GPU is not clocking any higher then you have some options you can turn up your
fan curve so you can have it be more aggressive and that might allow you to
attain that higher frequency or you can go you can turn up your voltage
um if if the temperatures were already under control you can go okay let the
GPU have more voltage or you can go okay i guess that's enough for me this is the
compromise that i'm willing to accept once you're done with your GPU clock
offset and you say okay this is this is where i've settled in it's either you
know got to back it off for stability or those other factors then you start with
your memory clock offset so the consistent performance that we were able
to get out of our titan on an air-cooled test bench and this is all great news
for overclockers because they can just throw a water block on it set the
voltage to max set the frequency to max and let the card basically overclock
itself anyway what we were able to do on an air-cooled test bench was a
consistent clock speed on the GPU of about 1.16 gigahertz in a 3d application which
is running right now it's running at around around 95 to 100 percent board
power when the game's actually running when we've been in it for a while and a
memory clock of 3.348 gigahertz so that
is at double data rate almost six point
actually it's about 6.7 gigahertz on the memory and then 1.16 gigahertz on the
GPU so the performance of this is absolutely outstanding and even in a
game like crysis 3 which we're running at extremely high settings so you can
see right here using evga precision monitoring i can see what everything's
running at what my memory usage is we're running at around 140 FPS in crisis 2
which is just outstanding so i hope this has been helpful for you guys and good
luck with your overclocking endeavors whether it's on a titan or some other
video card that supports GPU boost too don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech
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