Russmaf
Has anyone been seeing a degradation of overclocks on your cards? I have a very aggressive fan curve setup where the fans are 100% at 70C and when I first got the cards I was able to get ram 4750mhz and core to 2138mhz running any game and or benchmark never surpassing 72C. Yet after hearing about this problem I went back to run some benchmarks to see if anything has changed and noticed that I am now seeing artifacting on 3dmark and heaven benchmark with 4750mhz on ram, so I had to drop ram overclock to 4500 mhz to keep card from artifacting. Also I was not able to get through a single benchmark when overclocked to my original 2138mhz on the core and ended up having to settle at an overclock of 2063mhz which yes is not that much and is still a very decent overclock. However I got the FTW card specifically for overclocking potential and was very happy with the results at first and now am a little upset to see them drop so much after just three months of use and not very hard use as I dont game as often as I would like. So please let me know if anyone else has seen any of these problems. I am still waiting on my thermal pads and maybe that will help cool the components better to get me back to my original overclocks. As of now I wonder if it would have been better to just do a cross ship with evga for a new card
Hi, assuming
all conditions such as ambient temp, case cooling, any number of variables
are the same between your two reference points (Three months) Your card has degraded in some manner. Your original over clocks are very impressive - well done! But my point is that if
EVERYTHING about your PC and GPU are the same as 3 months ago when you got impressive results, but
now you can't reach the same levels,then something somewhere is degrading. What else could cause that assuming conditions are exactly the same? Well, nothing, it shouldn't happen. The artifacts are especially worrying.
But doesn't even matter which component in the end, degradation is degradation and
not self healing. (It's not the high OCs, nothing to do with that, but it's the CHANGE you have experienced after just 3 months.) A GPU should absolutely not produce different results between any two reference points over 3 months. Or even over a year or two! I'm not talking about the slight difference good drivers may give, or anything minor like that.
It looks like you got some very good silicon. Buts that's irrelevant now. Degradation in exactly the same conditions over just 3 months is wholly unacceptable. If this is indeed your case (same conditions) then I would RMA the card. You still seem to be able to run an OC that's not bad even now, but all of that is irrelevant. (Sorry I keep repeating myself but it is important that the reference clocks you achieved 3 months ago are now considerably worse
under the same conditions.) Once a component starts to weaken/degrade it's damaged for whatever reason. A fix (thermal pads) would slow the process down, probably, may even improve a bit, but it's started, damage large or tiny exists. Electronic components (VRAM, MOSFETS, VRM or even the GPU itself)
wont' repair themselves.I strongly recommend you RMA. In your case, unfortunately, some kind of damage big or small, has started, and could be slowed down with fixes, or even reversed somewhat but damage already exists.
(Probably), but only if same conditions exist between two testings.
It's a double shame in your case, because I envy those original very good OCs. I reckon you started out very lucky, but with that lottery winning silicon, a component, or several possibly has suffered damage. Probably overheating VRAM Non of this is your fault, this enthusiast expensive type of card is bought by people who overclock. (Usually). So if you double check and clocks are down, you need to change the card.