Request: 5850 and 5870 voltage tweak and BIOS overclocking limits for dummies

[dug777]

As the title says, I am of the opinion that a thread which explained this would be enormously useful, and perhaps decrease the number of 'I just bought a Toxic/Vapor-X/insert non reference card name here, how do I change the voltage/I can't get past insert clock speeds here' threads we see

I don't have all, or indeed many of the answers, but I'll get the ball rolling and update the OP as you scholarly, helpful and ever so attractive gentlemen (and the odd lady no doubt) provide advice to assist me in this heroic and indeed slightly useful thread (unusual, I know ).

Here we go (and odds are that these are probably incorrect, or at least suffer from critical exceptions to the rule):

Applies to both 5850s and 5870s:

Non-reference cards don't usually allow you to change the voltage using software, or to flash to a BIOS that does.

Applies to 5850s

Only Asus and MSI ( any others?) cards have no BIOS-capped clock speeds, for other brand reference sample cards you will need to flash to an Asus or MSI BIOS to overclock beyond <insert clock speeds here>.

Applies to 5870s

 

[Apocalypse23]

As the title says, I am of the opinion that a thread which explained this would be enormously useful, and perhaps decrease the number of 'I just bought a Toxic/Vapor-X/insert non reference card name here, how do I change the voltage/I can't get past insert clock speeds here' threads we see

I don't have all, or indeed many of the answers, but I'll get the ball rolling and update the OP as you scholarly, helpful and ever so attractive gentlemen (and the odd lady no doubt) provide advice to assist me in this heroic and indeed slightly useful thread (unusual, I know ).

Here we go (and odds are that these are probably incorrect, or at least suffer from critical exceptions to the rule):

Applies to both 5850s and 5870s:

Non-reference cards don't usually allow you to change the voltage using software, or to flash to a BIOS that does.

Applies to 5850s

Only Asus (and Sapphire? any others?) cards have no BIOS-capped clock speeds, for other brand reference sample cards you will need to flash to an Asus (or Sapphire?) BIOS to overclock beyond <insert clock speeds here>.

Applies to 5870s

Settings
For the Asus 5870, (reference board) these were my settings:
Using MSI Afterburner, I set the following:
Light OC - Core:900MHZ Memory:1300 Voltage:1.162(stock) Fan:Auto
Mild OC - Core:1000MHZ Memory:1300 Voltage:1.299 Fan:45&#37; or Auto

For the Asus 5850, I'll let you know in a bit after I test it.

To let you know about cards having default OC bioses, Asus and MSI support the OC bioses I know for sure. If you have a Sapphire, PowerColor, Diamond, Visontek or any other brand card, you should first try changing your OC settings by using MSI Afterburner, if it doesn't allow you to, then flash your card BIOS. I think Hawk (AT member) listed how to flash your BIOS somewhere on these forums. But try the steps above. Your OC may vary, but you'd first want to OC your core, leave the mem as it is, and OC your core clock in small increments (30-50), then see if you need to apply any higher voltage, and go by it. I use a few tests like 3dMarkVantage Calico to test out the card performance per OC. IF your video crashes in between, you'd need to up your voltage.

 

[Apocalypse23]

Okay I just tested the Asus 5850 and oced it to the maximum stable playable settings as follows:

Light OC - Core:900MHZ Memory:1000MHZ Voltage:1.150V Fan:Auto
Heavy OC - Core:1000MHZ Memory:1175MHZ Voltage:1.287V Fan:Auto --tested to be stable.

Your memory will probably not be able to go past the 1150 or 1175 mark on a 5850. The Core should be able to hit 1000MHZ I believe.

 

[Kenmitch]

Okay I just tested the Asus 5850 and oced it to the maximum stable playable settings as follows:

Light OC - Core:900MHZ Memory:1000MHZ Voltage:1.150V Fan:Auto
Heavy OC - Core:1000MHZ Memory:1175MHZ Voltage:1.287V Fan:Auto --tested to be stable.

Your memory will probably not be able to go past the 1150 or 1175 mark on a 5850. The Core should be able to hit 1000MHZ I believe.

Wondering why you made the statement in bold? I thought alot of them will hit the 1200-1300 range as the mem is the same as the 5870's.

Is it being you have an Asus 5850 card so you didn't flash the bios? Non ref design? My 5850 is a ref design and I flashed it with the hacked bios which was from a Asus 5870 originally. The 5870 feeds more voltage to the memory doesn't it?

Anyways mine seemed to scale all the way up to current clock without any loss in performance. I drop it down my performance drops down so I don't think it's doing any error corrections.

 

[Apocalypse23]

Wondering why you made the statement in bold? I thought alot of them will hit the 1200-1300 range as the mem is the same as the 5870's.

Is it being you have an Asus 5850 card so you didn't flash the bios? Non ref design? My 5850 is a ref design and I flashed it with the hacked bios which was from a Asus 5870 originally. The 5870 feeds more voltage to the memory doesn't it?

Anyways mine seemed to scale all the way up to current clock without any loss in performance. I drop it down my performance drops down so I don't think it's doing any error corrections.

Mine is a reference board that did not require any flashing of the BIOS. With my specific card, I first pushed the core clock to the highest setting of 1000MHZ ( I could go higher but did not wish to do so) while leaving the memory at default (1000MHZ), when I reached 1200MHZ on the memory, it was unstable while heavy gaming and I could notice this with black vertical lines showing on the screen. I even researched it and many reviewers could only push the memory on this card to about 1150MHZ. I managed 1175MHZ with a decent voltage bump. Your mileage may vary of course. What I did notice was that with a memory core bump from 1000 to 1100 to 1175, the overall fps did not increase significantly, it is the core clocks that matter the most.

My cards:
Asus 5850 is on top.

 

[Apocalypse23]

Look carefully at the frames results in 3d mark as I upped the memory, the core was steady at 1000MHz, but you can see that memory speed will not make a significant impact:

5850@ 1000/1000

5850@ 1000/1100

5850@ 1000/1175

5850@ 1000/1200 --not fully stable

 

[Kenmitch]

Look carefully at the frames results in 3d mark as I upped the memory, the core was steady at 1000MHz, but you can see that memory speed will not make a significant impact:

Hmm....Kinda strange results you got? Maybe what I read about the hacked bios as far as memory voltage is true. Kinda seems like your memory was unstable and doing error correction when you bumped it up maybe. I started my overclock just like yours core first then upped the memory. My frames kept climbing up as I upped the memory speed. The core I could possibly go higher but didn't wanna push the voltage anymore.

Maybe your cpu limited to some extent? Seems like my cpu and gpu are an even match in 3dmark at least.

I think I'd flash it with the hacked bios and try again if it was my card just for fun

Maybe I'll boot up my toy and look thru my screenshots to see the results again. This is the only photo I have on the thumbdrive at the moment.

 

[Apocalypse23]

Hmm....Kinda strange results you got? Maybe what I read about the hacked bios as far as memory voltage is true. Kinda seems like your memory was unstable and doing error correction when you bumped it up maybe. I started my overclock just like yours core first then upped the memory. My frames kept climbing up as I upped the memory speed. The core I could possibly go higher but didn't wanna push the voltage anymore.

Maybe your cpu limited to some extent? Seems like my cpu and gpu are an even match in 3dmark at least.

I think I'd flash it with the hacked bios and try again if it was my card just for fun

Maybe I'll boot up my toy and look thru my screenshots to see the results again. This is the only photo I have on the thumbdrive at the moment.

Yes I'm on an E8400@3.9Ghz atm, the i7 930 setup will be up on the 29th and I'm expecting higher GPU and CPU scores. I'm also running these tests on PCI-E 1.0 so there will be a minor fps gap.

What specific 5850 do you have (brand)? And when you say you reached 1000MHZ core, what was your memory speed at and also, the picture you posted, what settings is that score from?

 

[Kenmitch]

Visiontek which is ref card. Cheap bastards didn't even put a pretty sticker on it.

Speed of card from photo is what is in my sig. 950 cre 1300 memory.

I played around with afterburner and the msi unlocked bios. I didn't juice the core any higher than 1.195v which would do around 970 never tried any higher. Seemed like the scaling stopped until I upped my memory. I might play around with it more. I prefer the bios mod option. Set voltage and clocks at boot. Use CCC to bump fan up when testing.

I played around with some mild overclocks on my CPU but don't remember the scoring. GPU did scale with CPU tho. Nothing huge but I think some of 3dmark runs are somewhat CPU dependant other than the CPU ones of course.

 

[MagickMan]

My gift to 5850 peeps.

After a month of tweaking and testing, this is what I came up with. These BIOS fix the 2d bug issues and allow for easy OCing and voltage tweaking with Afterburner, but don't actually OC 3D clocks themselves. Not sure how it will work with non-reference cards, though. Two flavors here:

Normal 5850 2D fix
5870 hack for 5850 that also fixes 2D bug

The 5870 hack helps me with memory OCs, was finally able to get my card stable at 1050/1300. Enjoy.

Special thanks to Kenmitch for his help.

 

[railven]

I got a Giga Reference HD 5870 Eyefinity 6, what are common clocks for stock cooler?

I don't think I'd need the extra muscle yet, but will probably be picking up BFBC2 and Metro2033 before the end of the month.

 

[Triglet]

I got my XFX 5850 XXX to 900/1200 on stock voltage (1.088 I believe). 1225 was close to working on the mem, but 25mhz wasn't worth messing with. At 1250 the error correction in the memory was really kicking in resulting in a degradation of performance. Really wish the error correction wasn't there, the mem would be a lot easier to oc if it wasn't.

Pretty sure the clock could go up significantly with added voltage, but I didn't go there. Based on my Furmark/Unigine fps monitoring the core frequency had a much greater impact on performance when compared to the memory.