I recently overclocked my MSI GeForce GTX 970 and the performance increase has amazed me. I believe I’ve found the perfect settings and it should work the same for you as long as your power supply is fairly decent. I’m going to give you my speeds before and after, and some tools to monitor the overclock and temperatures once you’ve set it up to make sure it’s stable. We will only be increasing the Power Limit, Core Clock, and Memory Clock. I prefer not to touch the Core Voltage as we are limited by a 10% power limit, and I don’t think the gain from the increased voltage is worth it. I will list the tools I used to overclock, monitor and benchmark at end of the guide.
The stock speeds from MSI’s website are below. Not bad, but we can do better, with a few simple slider bars.
MSI GeForce GTX 970 GPU Default
Base: 1114MHz / Boost: 1253MHz / Actual: 1366MHz. Default voltage 1.206v
After Overclocking GTX 970
As you can see, it went up to a max of 1469 MHz from the stock cards max boost of 1366. It may not seem too crazy, but for the games I play it has made a very notable difference. One game improved more than others, and that was Ark Survival Evolved. It went from lagging every few steps to rarely giving me a hiccup, and I play on an Unofficial Server that has to render in HUGE base right next to mine every few minutes. I went from playing on medium/high settings to mostly epic settings while running better fps and stability than it did on the medium settings. This card is a pure beast.
Let’s Get to the Overclocking Settings – Step by Step
- Download MSI Afterburner
- Set Power Limit to 110%
- Set Core Clock to +140
- Set Memory Clock to +500
Apply the settings and save the profile.
That’s it!
The only thing we need to do now is benchmark and monitor the card while playing your most GPU intensive game.
You can benchmark with a game, or use Heaven Benchmark.
Monitor the temperatures and speeds with Open Hardware Monitor or GPU-Z.
I have no reason currently to try to push it up anymore as I don’t want to degrade the life of my card or begin to get artifacts, but if you want to go a little higher, it can.
Maximum GPU Temperature (in C) per Nvidia website is 98 degrees Celsius.
