7970 Overclocking results thread.

[VulgarDisplay]

I noticed that when I did not have +20% cranked in ati overdrive I would get spikey GPU usage in kombustor and the 7970 wouldn't wake up from sleep. Set it to +20% and my problems went away. It must have been throttling the GPU without that extra TDP room.

 

[Tempered81]

I don't see it in the settings, can you show me where it is?

Real voltage monitoring can be enabled by editing [Settings] section of hardware profiles (.\Profiles\VEN_.......cfg) and adding

VDDC_CHL8228_VIDReadback = 0
MVDDC_CHL8228_VIDReadback = 0

 

[suklee]

Cheers man, got it. On a setting of 1.225V @1200MHz, my core is actually getting only 1.101V. Does this sound about right?

 

[AdamK47]

I think I'm going to see how low I can get the voltage on my cards at 1GHz core. It would be nice to have really cool running GPUs along with a really cool running CPU.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I'm kinda disappointed in the card I got now. At 1125/1575 I have no problems running games. No crashes, and no artifacts. Unfortunately whenever my computer goes to sleep it will not resume when I have that overclock set. The fan profile is also behaving really odd.

I have a profile set in Afterburner that has the fan ramp up to 55% when the GPU is at 70C. For some reason the fan is constantly jumping up to 50% when the GPU temp is reading 34C. I don't know if my problems are all related to afterburner beta, or an unstable OC. I can't get the card to artifact in kombustor or in games.

 

[suklee]

What's the lowest you can clock your memory at? I found in AB anything below 1050 doesn't work - it resets back to 1375.

 

[blackened23]

I'm kinda disappointed in the card I got now. At 1125/1575 I have no problems running games. No crashes, and no artifacts. Unfortunately whenever my computer goes to sleep it will not resume when I have that overclock set. The fan profile is also behaving really odd.

I have a profile set in Afterburner that has the fan ramp up to 55% when the GPU is at 70C. For some reason the fan is constantly jumping up to 50% when the GPU temp is reading 34C. I don't know if my problems are all related to afterburner beta, or an unstable OC. I can't get the card to artifact in kombustor or in games.

Have you tried the other BIOS on your card? As for the recover from sleep issue, hmm Not sure. The fan thing is a weird issue. What causes it, is if you enable CCC overdrive, it automatically enables 50% auto fan - and that will sometimes override afterburners fan profile. Afterburner just added 7970 support so it hasn't caught up to overriding the overdrive? Just my hypothesis.

What I would suggest is this:

Disable overdrive, and overclock via afterburner only. don't do a double overclock with both overdrive and afterburner. That may help

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Have you tried the other BIOS on your card? As for the recover from sleep issue, hmm Not sure. The fan thing is a weird issue. What causes it, is if you enable CCC overdrive, it automatically enables 50% auto fan - and that will sometimes override afterburners fan profile. Afterburner just added 7970 support so it hasn't caught up to overriding the overdrive? Just my hypothesis.

What I would suggest is this:

Disable overdrive, and overclock via afterburner only. don't do a double overclock with both overdrive and afterburner. That may help

Does the second bios work better for people? I honestly forgot it was even there.

 

[AdamK47]

It's the same BIOS.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

So now that I'm not using the Afterburner beta at all my strange issues are no longer occuring. I think it's afterburner causing my problems. Maybe I should try TriXXX instead.

 

[blackened23]

Welp, i've had a LOT of luck oc'ing lately. One thing I want to add is it appears memory speed does make an appreciable difference in performance. Wiith my GTX 580's I always left it at 2100 , because benchmarks didn't really change with higher memory speed - however gpu clock made a big difference. (on the 580)

But I've been running benchmarks with crossfire 7970 @ 1170 / 1700, 1.187V and increasing the memory from 1600 > 1700 made a pretty big difference. I just ran metro 2033 frontline benchmark, 1080p, ultra high settings, tessellation, 4X MSAA, dx11 and got 99.8 fps averaged between 3 runs. Not too shabby! Also 3dmark11 was 14697. This was with HT off, with HT on the score would be well past 15k. (due to physics)

 

[AdamK47]

I'm taking the Ron Popiel route and setting my cards to 1000MHz core and 1600MHz memory at 1.125V per card. That way I don't have to worry about instability, they perform great, and they run cool. Set it and forget it. Did the same thing with my CPU and memory.

 

[MrK6]

So now that I'm not using the Afterburner beta at all my strange issues are no longer occuring. I think it's afterburner causing my problems. Maybe I should try TriXXX instead.

Yup, AB is buggy still.

Welp, i've had a LOT of luck oc'ing lately. One thing I want to add is it appears memory speed does make an appreciable difference in performance. Wiith my GTX 580's I always left it at 2100 , because benchmarks didn't really change with higher memory speed - however gpu clock made a big difference. (on the 580)

My experience yields the same result. It seems GCN will use all the bandwidth you can give it.

 

[AdamK47]

One thing I noticed with MSI Afterburner is that if you upgrade your drivers, the previously saved profiles will not work correctly. You have to manually delete the profiles under the profiles directory and then start MSI Afterburner. You will get a message stating that you will need to restart the PC in order for MSI Afterburner to detect some settings. It will start working correctly after that.

 

[Elfear]

Decided to flash to the Asus overclocking bios and the results so far look promising. I'm getting less vdroop than I was with the stock bios and my voltage limits are now 1.4V for GPU and 1.75V for memory. I've switched to the Asus GPU Tweak tool for overclocking too. A little more polished than AB although there are some features I miss (like having monitoring values save when you exit).

1390/1600 is stable at 1.325V (1.28V actual) running through a couple loops of the Metro 2033 benchmark. VRMs maxed at 45-46C, GPU@38C. I must have got some dud ram as 1650 is about as high as it will go even at 1.7V. Anything higher and I start to lose performance in Vantage.

What surprised me is that the +125mV OVP seems to have disappeared with the new bios. Changing the voltage from 1.25V to 1.3V didn't seem to help much on the stock bios.

 

[blackened23]

Decided to flash to the Asus overclocking bios and the results so far look promising. I'm getting less vdroop than I was with the stock bios and my voltage limits are now 1.4V for GPU and 1.75V for memory. I've switched to the Asus GPU Tweak tool for overclocking too. A little more polished than AB although there are some features I miss (like having monitoring values save when you exit).

1390/1600 is stable at 1.325V (1.28V actual) running through a couple loops of the Metro 2033 benchmark. VRMs maxed at 45-46C, GPU@38C. I must have got some dud ram as 1650 is about as high as it will go even at 1.7V. Anything higher and I start to lose performance in Vantage.

What surprised me is that the +125mV OVP seems to have disappeared with the new bios. Changing the voltage from 1.25V to 1.3V didn't seem to help much on the stock bios.

I've heard others mention this too. Different BIOS's have different voltage and vdroop settings, a lot of people are saying the asus one is more tolerant of voltage increase. Your card will have higher temps though! Be aware (although you dont' have to worry about it)

The MSI 7970 has an alternate voltage profile on BIOS2 and apparently it removes vdroop and increases voltage a lot. My card ran about 10-12c hotter at the same settings with BIOS2, was pretty weird

 

[Elfear]

I've heard others mention this too. Different BIOS's have different voltage and vdroop settings, a lot of people are saying the asus one is more tolerant of voltage increase. Your card will have higher temps though! Be aware (although you dont' have to worry about it)

The MSI 7970 has an alternate voltage profile on BIOS2 and apparently it removes vdroop and increases voltage a lot. My card ran about 10-12c hotter at the same settings with BIOS2, was pretty weird

With the stock bios, I would set 1.175V in AB and actual would be ~1.1V. Kinda surprised actually that a new bios would help fix vdroop. I'd think that was more a function of the number of power phases.

Regarding temps, I think 46C on the VRMs is ok. Seems like someone mentioned 90C being the limit. Really hoping to hit 1400Mhz on the core but I've been hesitant until we find out the limits of 28nm parts.

 

[MrK6]

With the stock bios, I would set 1.175V in AB and actual would be ~1.1V. Kinda surprised actually that a new bios would help fix vdroop. I'd think that was more a function of the number of power phases.

Regarding temps, I think 46C on the VRMs is ok. Seems like someone mentioned 90C being the limit. Really hoping to hit 1400Mhz on the core but I've been hesitant until we find out the limits of 28nm parts.

VRM's are good for 115C+, probably 125C max. You got some fantastic results Elfear; I'm going to try my luck with the ASUS BIOS as well. I did before, but that was before the card was on water and I pushed it. I agree though, it'd be nice to figure out what the "safe" maximums are.

 

[Elfear]

VRM's are good for 115C+, probably 125C max. You got some fantastic results Elfear; I'm going to try my luck with the ASUS BIOS as well. I did before, but that was before the card was on water and I pushed it. I agree though, it'd be nice to figure out what the "safe" maximums are.

With your high-clocking ram you should be able to see some very nice results with the higher core frequencies. Post up your results after you flash it.

Good to know about the VRM limits too.

 

[MrK6]

With your high-clocking ram you should be able to see some very nice results with the higher core frequencies. Post up your results after you flash it.

Good to know about the VRM limits too.

So I flashed my BIOS and got GPU Tweak 2.03 running, but the overclocking limits won't boost my available GPU volts - the slider still maxes at 1.25V. Is there anything else to enable?

 

[Tempered81]

You probably used the wrong bios or wrong version of gputweak

 

[Elfear]

So I flashed my BIOS and got GPU Tweak 2.03 running, but the overclocking limits won't boost my available GPU volts - the slider still maxes at 1.25V. Is there anything else to enable?

Are you using GPU Tweak to overclock? I switched to that after I flashed the bios and it lets me go all the way up to 1.4V.

 

[Tempered81]

Are you using GPU Tweak to overclock? I switched to that after I flashed the bios and it lets me go all the way up to 1.4V.

try sharing your bios with MRK6, GPUTweakerVER2026UpdateOCEnhanceString2

 

[Elfear]

try sharing your bios with MRK6, GPUTweakerVER2026UpdateOCEnhanceString2

This is the bios I used.

 

[MrK6]

Righto, thanks guys, flashing that one and I'll see what happens. Be right back :awe: