I have been doing some reading on these maxwell chips and there are some interesting things that I have found.
First there is no correlation between the asic score and the eventual overclock. my first 970 sc had an asic of 78 and it overclocked right to 1500. the only thing the asic does is set your base boost clock but it does not ensure that you will be able to get anything over that limit. my current ssc+ with an asic of 67% gets to 1560+
here is another that I have noticed with maxwell cards. same card same asic score and yet we will see a difference in boost clocks. this seems to be part of the maxwell voltage controller and how it dynamically tries to keep up with heat, voltage and core clock. In other words you can set two cards with an offset of +90 and you will get two different boost clocks. For example, with our five different EVGA GTX 960 SSC cards, with a GPU offset of +90 MHz, the resulting peak Boost clock speeds were 1544 MHz, 1558 MHz, 1519 MHz, 1533 MHz and 1507 MHz. But that did not indicate where the final stable overclocked speed would sit. One card would reach as high as 1547 MHz (with a +130 MHz offset) while others would find the +90 mark to be their limit. Essentially, the GPU offset is a rather useless metric for comparing card clock rates, even among identical products.
source:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/GeForce-GTX-960-Overclocking-Report-13-Cards-Tested you must check in game and never use these furry tests or anything that pushes unneeded voltage to the GPU as it will not show you any real world results. you must test in game. I use metro ll, rome total war 2, valley and heaven benchmarks, tomb raider and any game i am currently playing. these all have built in benchmarks and are great for testing real world results. I have on occasion scene my card boost over 1560MHz all on its own then bring itself back down.
source:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/02/02/msi_geforce_gtx_960_gaming_overclocking_review/2 the above has some good info if you go to the "overclocking has changed" part, the only thing to be taken into account is with the ssc+ we have allot more power target headroom so you can increase your voltage and it can help with stability and overclock.
other news and notes pertaining to my ssc+ and overclocking.
I have noticed a consistent voltage drop that drops the core clock by 13Hz (not at reference clocks). The only voltage offsets that really seem to do anything for me are at +10,20,30,40. at +40 I can keep the voltage at 1.243. anything lower than +40 and that voltage will drop all on its own after a couple of minutes. btw my power usage is still not breaking 100% and I can leave my power limit set at 100% and it has no negative effect. this is a 67 asic score card.
while testing OC in rome total war 2 I have noticed a firm limit right at 3.5 GDDR usage. I need to test more to see if I can hit 4 GDDR usage but it seems to reallocate memory back down to 3.5 while benchmarking. I have done very limited testing for this game so far but if anybody else wanted to see if it occurred for them that would be cool. I am trying to find as many memory hogs as I can so that I can better asses when and what types of games will need and want the 4 GDDR both now and in the future. I like strategy games so seeing a limit in that type of game would be troublesome for me.