I have the SC 970 and I have tried all kinds of over clocks with it. The other day I decided to turn vsync off so I could see how hard my card can be pushed. My vsync is 60fps. I only put real hours of gameplay into WoW.

I have an overclock save in precision x something like - 50 core, 250 mem. Of course this is with 110% power target. This seems to result in crashes (display driver... Kernel etc etc) while playing wow. Doesn't happen straight away. It's more like 1hour +. This even happened with vsync turned on.

So I decided to just use the 110% power target and I still get crashes. Vsync or not.

My case has 3 intakes and 2 exhausts. 2 120mm at the front and 1 120mm on the side that blows just underneath the GPU all intakes and both my exhausts are at the rear top of the case one is on the h55. My CPU has a h55 on it and is reasonably cool. The GPU never got higher than 74C even when I had vsync off and a quiet fan curve. With vsync on my GPU stays below 70C with a little bit more aggressive of a fan curve.

Any ideas why?

I would never RMA a card for that. I would be afraid they would just sent it lol.

I was curious as most other people (and I mean most) seem to be able to hit silly clocks in these cards and they say they are stable.

I know boosting the power target to 110% is stil an overclock but shouldn't it be able to do that?

i am definitely getting crashes with just the power target adjusted, just happened now with WoW in fullscreen windowed mode while i was browsing the internet...
 
any ideas what this is? i have a quite aggressive fan profile - 70C it will be pushing 70% fan speed. < because of that i am not seeing temps go over 69C

i dont really want to RMA because its pretty hard for it to do it. it only happens when i am browsing the internet while i have wow in the background in fullscreen windowed mode.
 
seems wow doesnt stop using the gpu while its in fullscreen windowed mode, whether i am on it or not.

yea i was just about to report back with nothing running in the background i have just had another driver crash...
 
is that on the nvidia to fix list? cba to f about going to that previous drivers...

bsmegreg
You're over clocking a card that's already been overclocked from the factory. Some of the cards can clock higher than others because of the silicone lottery. Basically, some cards are better than others. Cooling isn't the issue, it's the impuritys in the silicone chip on your GPU that is becoming an issue as you clock higher. If you really wanted to, you could RMA the card for not over locking, but I can't describe how silly that would be to pay $50 in shipping for a new card that's probably going to clock the same.

You can't RMA a card because it won't overclock as you would like it to. If the card runs correctly at the clocks it's designed to run at then there is no fault.