The other bonus feature of the SSC is the ability to dial up the power throttle target higher than the lower end cards. It was just a few short years ago that hitting the 1Ghz milestone with water cooling was a big deal, and now we’re able to hit 1.5Ghz with the stock air cooler! During benchmarks after we overclocked we were seeing the boost clock hit over 1.5Ghz! Considering that the GTX 970 isn’t the flagship GPU, and this is with air cooling, it’s pretty impressive. That may not sound like a lot for a modern GPU, but the EVGA 970 SSC is already overclocked with a boost clock over 1.3Ghz. This particular sample we were able to overclock a reasonable 75Mhz. Therefore the simplest method is to run some quick benchs to find where the card quickly breaks and then simply dial it back 20-40 MHz Bear in mind that as every bench stresses the GPU slightly differently that being perfectly stable on one bench doesn’t mean being stable on every game at the same clock. It’s generally recommended to run a bench test for twenty-four hours but unless you’re trying to max out your GPU to the very last Mhz, a few hours will be fine.

By doing initial testing with a program like Fire Strike or applications that run the GPU at 100% usage for several hours, you can be sure that the GPU is absolutely stable. GPU usage varies, as does the clock speed and load temperatures. Stress testing is important because more often than not a game does not utilize every bit of the GPU. Other good applications for stress testing since it runs the GPU at 100% usage 24/7. The other piece of software that you’ll want to download is a test bench application such as the applications from Futuremark or another benchmark like Valley. EVGA even have their own overclocking software called Precision X that is readily available to download for free from their website. Overclocking, Temps, & Noise Overclockingįortunately overclocking these days is as easy as downloading a couple pieces of software.

Overclocking with evga precision x 970