ASUS NVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti Overclocking

[CStingerGhost1]

Hey guys!

I'm a bit new to the forums.
I've been wanting to further overclock my factory-OC'd ASUS GeForce GTX 660 Ti.
So I did...it's currently running stable at 1095 megahertz. The temperature never goes above 69 degrees Celsius (what a strange coincidence 😛 ).
It gains me like...five extra FPS (average) on Crysis 2 at maximum settings. However, the performance increase is more on games that are more resource-intensive (ten FPS increase on Metro 2033).
I've been trying to push it so that I can be sure to run Crysis 3 on maximum settings...which may or may not be possible. It's downloading now.

But I was wondering: Do I have to clock my VRAM relative to my core clock? The factory OC had it at 6048 megahertz, and I brought it up to 6058 megahertz. Do I need to go higher? Will it gain me more performance. I know that the bus on the 660 Ti is only 192-bit, so OC'ing VRAM should have a higher gain than it would on a 256-bit card.

[Chino]

The general rule is to overclock both to their highest point where they would be stable with each other.

[CStingerGhost1]

Chino wrote:
The general rule is to overclock both to their highest point where they would be stable with each other.

Alright, so do I OC one at a time? Like, OC my core up by ten megahertz...test...
If stable- OC VRAM by ten megahertz...test...
If stable- Repeat

Because that's what I was doing.
I got my core up to 1135 megahertz and then had a game crash. I figured it may not have to do with the overclock, but went back down to 1125 just in case. Crashed again, went down to 1115 megahertz on the core and now I'm stable at about 72 degrees celsius. No game crashes.
That's pretty good for me, since I can get 45-50 FPS on nearly max settings (I have TXAA on Medium) for the Crysis 3 Beta. Other games run much better than before too.
I will continue to OC my VRAM as well. How do I know when I've hit my clock ceiling? Artifacts...crashes...etc.? I don't want to permanently damage anything.

[Chino]

Yeah, you overclock each separately to find the maximum and then combine the two and finetune it.

So basically what you'll want to do is start overclocking the Core Clock with increments of 10Mhz or 20Mhz whichever you like until it crashes. Then you''ll decrease by 5Mhz until you find the stable point. Once you do, write down that number.

Next, you'll want to reset the Core Clock back to its default speed and overclock the Memory Clock the same way as you did with the Core Clock. But for this you can use increments of 100Mhz until you crash. And use decrements of 25Mhz to find the stable point. Once you do, write down that number too.

The final step is to combine the two maximums. Now if everything goes right, you should be stable. If you don't, you'll decrease the Core Clock by 1Mhz and the Memory Clock by 5Mhz until you get stable.

What you want to do is to always keep your temperature below 70C because Kepler's first throttle point is at that temperature. Instead of doing in game testing, you can download and install Unigine Heaven to do quick stability tests. Usually takes like 6 minutes for a complete run or so. When you've found your absolute stable overclock, then go in game testing.

[CStingerGhost1]

Okay, got it!