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GTX 680 Overclocking Question

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Hey guys, new guy here. :)

I recently got my hands on a EVGA GTX 680 - lovely card, quite happy with it :)

I was trying my hand at some overclocking with EVGA Precision X, and it's definitely quite different from what I'm used to with my 560, haha. I got a stable OC with +130 GPU offset and +500 mem offset.

One question though, I have my power target set at 132% and I've been playing around with Crysis and doing some Heaven benchmarks. I've turned on my OSD but I never seem to pass 100% power? Am I missing something, perhaps a setting, or is that normal? I've seen others go up to 115% sometimes when running the heaven benchmarks, but I have never gone past 100% personally.

Just wondering because I want to see if I can get a higher OC if I can figure this out, haha!

Thanks for any help you guys can provide!
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
You may be throttling. If the GPU hits 70C it will throttle back turbo clocks.
 
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You may be throttling. If the GPU hits 70C it will throttle back turbo clocks.

Ah rats, I knew I forgot something. I've adjusted my fan curve as well, but just to make sure I ran Heaven to check my temperatures and it never goes past 62° C.

Could it be the benchmarks/games I've tried so far? I'll try a few more and see if any of them push me past 100%.

Thank you for your help though, EarthDog! :)
 
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what drivers are you using? i heard that drivers 300.83(i think) would help with my stuttering in bf3 and they are only on the disc that comes with your gpu. they had a much more aggressive throttling i found and i to never saw the power go over 100.

on the latest nvidia drivers i do see it go over 100%
 
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what drivers are you using? i heard that drivers 300.83(i think) would help with my stuttering in bf3 and they are only on the disc that comes with your gpu. they had a much more aggressive throttling i found and i to never saw the power go over 100.

on the latest nvidia drivers i do see it go over 100%

At the moment, I'm using the latest stable drivers. Should I try using the beta drivers?
 
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First: make sure you have the Power Limiter up to it's max in Precision X

Second: if you are air cooled turn up your fan to max. (Note the cards you see that don't throttle down most of the time are water cooled and able to stay under Nvidia's 70C temp limit)

Third: Even with Power Limit enabled to it's max... if your cards don't deem all that performance worthy.... they will and still can scale down. Even if you are under the thermal of 70c..... now it will do it less with the Power Limiter turned all the way up. But it doesn't guarantee anything for sure.

These cards really shine under water....and if Nvidia would unlock the voltage limit to at least 1.3v these cards would fly even further.
 
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First: make sure you have the Power Limiter up to it's max in Precision X

Second: if you are air cooled turn up your fan to max. (Note the cards you see that don't throttle down most of the time are water cooled and able to stay under Nvidia's 70C temp limit)

Third: Even with Power Limit enabled to it's max... if your cards don't deem all that performance worthy.... they will and still can scale down. Even if you are under the thermal of 70c..... now it will do it less with the Power Limiter turned all the way up. But it doesn't guarantee anything for sure.

These cards really shine under water....and if Nvidia would unlock the voltage limit to at least 1.3v these cards would fly even further.

Thank you for the informative post, 20mmrain! I will try to turn up the fan speed to max and see if that helps. I recently tried BF3 for a bit and it jumped to 105% for like 1/10th of a second, so that's progress! I think it might just be related to the programs I've been using.

EDIT: I bumped up my fan speed to max and GPU clock offset to +150 and I was getting 120% consistently in the Heaven benchmark! Driver crashed after 10 minutes though. I suppose that means that enough power is being used for my current stable OC, hence why it isn't going up past 100%. The question now is, does that mean if I get better cooling, I can achieve a higher OC?
 
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