greetings, my oculus rift is arriving tomorrow and the recommended specs are as follows:

NVIDIA GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 480 or greater

minimum specs are as follows:

NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 470 or greater

I myself have a GTX 970, which i heard is about the same as a GTX 1050 Ti

i would like to be able to be above the "minimum" and at least have a constant 60 fps when using it, so i was thinking maybe before buying a new card i can try overclocking? never done it before, and no idea what i'm doing. i watched a couple of tutorials and walkthroughs, but i feel like there's got to be more to this than what i'm picking up. is there a formulaic method of overclocking brought down to a science? based on my specs and what i want out of my card, would you be able to confidently recommend numbers to tweak things to in the MSI Afterburner?

my specs are as follows:

https://imgur.com/a/8y4BJWj

Which MSI 970 model?

Try running to run furmark for 15 minutes to check temperature. https://geeks3d.com/furmark/

For reference I ran my SLI MSI 970 twin frozr at 1470Mhz +500 on Vram.

No there are no formulaic method of overclocking. Because all chips are not equal. It's pretty much based on the silicon lottery.

This post was edited by ZwiX on Jul 26 2018 04:13am

A 5-10% overclock might help boost frames by 1-5fps, but anything higher is going to create artifacts and cause issues. The 970 should be compatible with oculus, but dont expect 60 fps at all times. 3d demands a lot of power and the cards each have their individual limits.

970 is near 1060

For that gpu I'd recommend 50 frequency jumps. Add 50 core then run a stability test for 5 min.

Repeat until you hit +100 core.

At 100 core begin increasing by 25 core.

Run each test for 5 min.

When you fail add voltage at .05 increments until it is stable for 10 minutes.

Begin adding 25 core increments and voltage as necessary.

You will hit one of two walls :

Thermal (temperature)

Or

Chipset threshold. Essentially where you would need to add a lot of voltage for a minimal core increase. If you experience this before high temperature back off by 50-75 core then run a final test.

Once you find your core and voltage setting run the test for a couple of hours.

If its stable you're done.

furmark is too much imo, it's the only thing I've ever ran on my PC that instantly throttles my GPU and I think that's by design. Very strange benchmark and I think it just goes a little too hard and is absolutely unrepresentative of any form of gameplay.

I'd test with Unigine Heaven or Valley instead and be ready to deal with a crash or two once you start gaming. If you do crash just lower clock a tiny bit.

As far as voltage goes, just max that bitch out from the start alongside power and temperature limit, these cards are limited in the BIOS and it's impossible to damage them on stock BIOS from overclocking.

Yeah. But if it handles furmark, stable, it can handle anything. An absolute threshold. Whats a 3% higher clock going to do at that point?