Need help with overclocking (17r3, 965m)

hello everyone.

I have an alienware 17r3 with the 965m (stock paste), i run a +135mhz oc on the core with no issues whatsoever, but this is as far as the nvidia drivers would let me with the stock VBios, and i've read about people achieving even 1450mhz peak clock with it (it basically becomes a 970m).

Having said that, i'm very scared when it comes to OC, even though my stress temps on my gpu are quite low once the fans kick into second gear (they hover around the high 50s).

I was hoping you guys would help guide me through the process of unlocking and overclocking my GTX 965m and tell me about the voltage requirements and all that nice scary stuff.

important note: my 965m is the older model running on the GM204 chip (the newer revisions run on GM206)

 

In order to unlock voltage control and clockspeed - you need a custom BIOS flashed onto your machine which in turn carries a risk of completely bricking the device. Now, sometimes warranty applies but other times OEMs can be a pain about a bricked BIOS. Especially if they discover you've been modding it.

As for clocks - I doubt you'll be able to get something like 1450 without LM and quite a bit of modding. And even then power might become an issue or the VRMs may not handle it.

 

yea it appears that tye general consesus is it's not worth thr trouble, +135 is enough

 

960M and 965M are bandwidth-starved. See if you can OC the memory.

 

well i can, got to +300 and didn't try higher, but my bottleneck has always been core performance not VRam

 

You're not entirely correct. Unlike the desktop Maxwell GPUs, laptop models have insanely cut-down memory speeds. For example, the memory on a 965M runs at 5GHz whereas the closest desktop card, the 950, is something like 7GHz or more. You can see how that affects performance.

 

if that were completely true then i would've seen some performance gains from OCing my memory, but as of yet i haven't

 

Is the OC properly being registered? From what I remember about my Y50's 860M, even 125MHz to the memory gave me a pretty tangible increase of 5-6 fps in basically every game.

 

yes it's registered, i have afterburner overlay and the memory clocks as 2700mhz (running +200 atm) and i don't see and fps increase.

 

Try going higher. Afterburner is reporting the 2x speed. In reality, your memory is only running at +100MHz (1350) as that is how GDDR5 works - it's the base times 4. So your effective clock is 5400. Try to get something like 5800-6000 for effective.

 

i read reports of people bsoding with 350 and over, i don't have the nerve to go over 300 tbh.

and i know msi is reporting the base, it's "double data rate" after all

 

GDDR5 is double-double data rate. The base of the memory is, and has always been the effective divided by 4. GPU-Z should report the real base.

 

now you're making me doubt my knowledge, what's the base for memory marketed as 2500mhz gddr5?

edit: so the speed reported my msi is double the base, but the actual effective memory speed is 4 times the base, did i get that right?

 

Precisely - if you have a base of 1250, then the effective is 5000 and MSI AB reports 2500