New Catalyst and 7970 - lower voltage?

[dkm777]

Hi folks,

A little while ago my good ol' Sapphire 7970 Vapor-X 1150MHz Core, 1600MHz Memory started crashing when under heavy load (pale color screen, sometimes with vertical stripes). I found that when using the latest Catalyst (13.11 beta) my voltage under load was reduced from ~1.26V to just barely 1.2V. Now crashing makes sense, but what doesn't is why would something like this happen? New power saving/boost features introduced? Just for information - my Vapor-X is voltage locked and it runs at what the driver tells it to, so no workarounds here. Adjusting the Power Limit makes no difference. I had to reset to stock settings and suffer a drop in performance. I don't know whom to get pissed off at - AMD or Sapphire.

 

[Fastx]

dkm try Trix V4.6 I believe V4.6 will unlock your locked 7970 Vapor X voltage so you can raise it back up. Eariler versions of Trixx will not but V4.6 should.

https://www.sapphireselectclub.com/ssc/TriXX/

 

[dkm777]

Holy crap! It really does work! I tried this version of TriXX before, but apparently some leftovers from previous Nvidia drivers wouldn't let it do its thing. Since I had reinstalled Windows a few weeks ago it now works - voltage and overclocking. A lesson learned - when changing GPU reinstall Windows. No exceptions.

 

[Erenhardt]

Holy crap! It really does work! I tried this version of TriXX before, but apparently some leftovers from previous Nvidia drivers wouldn't let it do its thing. Since I had reinstalled Windows a few weeks ago it now works - voltage and overclocking. A lesson learned - when changing GPU reinstall Windows. No exceptions.

Nice job. I don't think fresh windows in necessary, but driver sweeper is a must.
On the side note: One may think that those manufacturers do this on purpose, so when someone changes brand, he will have a bad time thanks to backstabbing old driver left(on purpose)-overs. This way he may come back to the brand he left /:ninja:

 

[dkm777]

Another observation - it looks like the new Catalyst thrashes the memory controller a lot harder than previous versions. I can now go up to 1540MHz for memory while it was doing 1600MHz easily before.