xizorgetspeed
Hey guys, after quite some missions (I won't bore you with my sob story lol) I finally have received my FTW and its up and running.
 
I've installed drivers straight from Nvidia's site, latest ones.
 
After this first thing I did is ran timespy and got 6501.  http://www.3dmark.com/spy/128198
 
I'm looking for some directions on how to proceed next.  I am a total noob at this and I haven't used a PC for 6-7 years and have forgotten everything.
 
Should I install precision x?  or MSI afterburner?  how do I overclock?  am I supposed to flip the bios switch on the physical card?  how do I change the RGB lighting?
 
Also, looking at the bottom of the card the RGB is all white except one corner which is yellowish tinge.  RMA worthy or is this normal...
 
Many thanks in advance.

I personally like Afterburner, as it currently is a more mature product and easy for me to use as it was what I was used to back with the old Precision X that was written at that time by the same guy. You can also try both and decide which you prefer - just don't run them at the same time lol. To change the RGB lighting on your card though, I believe you will need to do it in Precision X.
 
Overclocking is very easy using AB, just open it up - I would go ahead and enable software fan control and set it to use the default software fan curve. Should do a good job keeping your new FTW cool whilst gaming. No need to switch to the second bios.
Keep in mind the FTW cards are already factory overclocked and rated to run at their overclocked speeds. Anything else you get above and beyond that is gravy.
 
I would leave the voltage at default for now. Start upping the core by about 30 MHz at a time, testing in between. I like to run a benchmark like 3dMark TimeSpy. If all looks good, at a little more. I have gotten mine up to plus 140 on the core, but did not make a huge difference between that and +100,  so I backed it back down to +100 to make sure it was good and stable.
 
I then added memory clock, you can add more here. I got mine up to +500 and seemed pretty stable, tried 600 and it crashed. Backed it down to 400 to be safe.
 
My core clock boosts to around 2.1 ghz now, and usually settles in while gaming to around 2050 mhz. Very pleased with it.
I just prefer not to get into adding voltage and more speed, to me the gains are not enough to warrant going through that... I just want to game with decent fps, not into benchmarking scores so much.
 
Best of luck, you got a great card there.
 
 

xizorgetspeed
Thanks, this helped.  Followed your settings and got this result.
http://www.3dmark.com/spy/130437
 
Pretty happy with this.  I'm sure I can mess around some more and get it over the 2100 mark.

Very nice, great job!
 

hapkiman
And FYI don't mess or flip with the BIOS switch unless you are flashing to a new BIOS.  This switch allows you to try flashing to a new or different BIOS, but keep a known stable one.  But use caution when messing with the BIOS.  Or you could end up with a very expensive paperweight.

Just to add a small note to that. Anytime you change the BIOS switch should only be done when the computer is shut-off to avoid any accidental corruption

There should be no conflict as long as you are sure Afterburner is not running in the background while you use Precision X OC.  I actually have ASUS Tweak II, Afterburner, and Precision X OC all installed on my rig, but none run at start up or in the background until I open one of them.  And I never run more than one at a time.  It sounds like you had both apps running at the same time.