6970 - Enabling Overdrive and Undervolting your R3

I decided to sit down and play with my R3 after playing army for a few weeks without it.
I finally figured out how to undervolt the 6970 as well as enable overdrive to allow overclocking without additional software, so I figured I'd share the steps...

First I have to give the generic warning. These steps involve flashing your bios, which could kill your card (I've been doing stuff like this for years and never had a problem, but I realize that every time I do it, I could end up spending money). I am just posting this information as and FYI, if you choose to follow it, it's all on you if you break your stuff.


Download ATI Winflash

Extract the files and open atiwinflash.
Click save, this will save your stock bios to the destination of your choosing.

OVERDRIVE

To enable overdrive in the bios you must download Radeon Bios Editor
Open RBE, and then open your saved bios
It will give you a warning that overdrive settings could not be found, click ok
go to the additional tab and you'll see method 2, slide the sliders to the max (1mhz) and then save the bios (as a different file so you keep your stock bios saved just in case).
Exit RBE and then start it again, load your edited bios.
Go to the additional tab again, and slide the sliders to the max (2mhz this time, yay).
Save the bios and exit, keep repeating this process until you have something along the lines of 780mhz core and 1200mhz ram available.
What this does is allow you to select up to 780/1200 in overdrive.

If you're still reading, you don't have to do that last part, I'm attaching a bios that has the clocks up to 780mhz core and 1200mhz ram speed available.

Now open atiwinflash again
Select load image and open the bios you edited or one of the bioses I've attached in this post.
Select program and let atiwinflash reprogram your bios.
It will ask you to restart, click no for right now.

Now open up regedit
goto HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ATI\ACE\Settings\Graphics\OverDrive2
Change the value of the key that says Accessible from "NOBODY" to "ALL"

Now you can restart your laptop.

After restart, open control center and see if you have overdrive available.
If you do, have fun, if not go back into regedit change the accessible option for OverDrive 3 and OverDrive 5, just like you did with OverDrive 2.


Undervolting

Undervolting allows you to reduce the voltage and temps of the gpu. My max temps after a repaste and running furmark for 15 mins was 74*C, after undervolting, I don't get past 71*C.

Undervolting the card is much like the unlock of overdrive above, except goto the clock settings tab and change the voltage for Clock info 00 to your liking. You'll have to type the vale in, and acceptable values are .9, .95, 1, 1.05, and 1.1
I tried everything and found 1v to be the sweet spot for my card, note yours maybe different.
After changing this (or downloading the attached bios) open up atiwinflash.
Select load image and open the bios you edited or one of the bioses I've attached in this post.
Select program and let atiwinflash reprogram your bios.
It will ask you to restart, click yes.
I ran some stability tests with 3dmark and furmark, but my favorite way to test is just to play games.


NOTES

I am attaching 4 bioses to this post.
Blackcomb stock.bin is the stock M17x R3 6970 bios
Stock with OverDrive.rom is stock voltages with overdrive enabled
Modded 1v.rom is stock bios with 3d voltage set to 1volt and overdrive enabled
Modded 1.05v.rom is stock bios with 3d voltage set to 1.05volts and overdrive enabled (if you have issues with the 1volt file, this should increase stability in yours).

please let me know if you have questions, I typed this all up pretty fast so I'm sure I missed something, or explained it horribly.

 

Nice work, +1

 

Nice post man! About your modded VBIOS though, what are clocks are you running at 1.0V? I know somebody on here managed to get full stock clocks and stable @ .910V.

 

Worked like a charm to enable OD for my 6970M transplanted into a M15x (using Cat 11.7 developer drivers), but increased the limits to 900/1200. Thanks and +Rep.

 

I haven't had much time to play with clocks at 1v yet, been busy with other stuff. I wasn't aware that you could run .91v on these cards, I thought it was in .05 increments, so .91v would default to .95v. I'll have to play with that though and see. For me .90v on stock clocks was a no go, but it may work for others with more cherry cards than I...

 

Well after playing around for a while now with the clocks, I can do 735/960 @ 1v without issue. I don't know what others are getting with their cards however...

 

Is that the highest you can go at the lower voltages? It'd be nice if undervolting stablized the card a bit more to allow higher clocks but at stock voltage I can run up to 850ish/1200ish so that's definitely a no go in my book. I just wish somebody could find a way to up the voltage on the card, I think that's the only thing holding us back from higher clocks/bench scores.

 

yeah, I never played around with clocks before I undervolted so I have nothing to compare it to. I'm at the point where I'd rather have a cool running laptop since I typically game at my buddies house while sitting on his couch, lol.

 

I can't use overdrive.......... everything is greyed out? And I flashed my new VID values but they don't seem to stick.......


EDIT
forgot to press the key to unlock the tool, my n00bish error -__-

 

How do you press the key to unlock the tool?!

 

there is a picture of a lock above the settings, you click on that and it "unlocks" the ability to overclock the card.

 

I'm such a baby... Thank you...

 

no worries buddy, the little picture is not really the smartest way of keeping that stuff locked.

 

Nice to have this overdrive option enabled, setup and ready always, without having to install and use any other third party soft, stable as well. I played few games and so far no issues (with the card overclocked at 780/1200).

Thank you custom90gt for making this wonderful, helpful thread

 

I'm starting to wonder why my ram speeds suck so much. I can get 800/1000, but much more on the ram and games will lock up after half an hour or so. Temps seem ok though.

 

Hmmmm good write up

 

What is the highest/lowest you can go for the clocks and voltages?

 

Well at 1volt my card will do 780\1200. I thought my ram sucked, but it runs well.

 

Bump anyone else have any success with this? Temps are down by about 4C now...

 

Anyway to just undervolt it when it is downclocked so it idles cooler?

 

Good question, I dunno if you can go lower than the .9v that it idles at. I will try to play with it a little.

 

Alright sounds good I will check back later.

Edit: I am also wondering if there is some way I can edit voltage when it is overclocked?

 

is it working with 5870m on r2?

thanks in advance!

+rep

 

the steps should be similar, but you will have to get the bios from the card. I dunno what voltages you can run it on however...

 

yeah, I can edit its voltage through RBE editor, but I mean would it unlock overdrive function on CCC with 5870m? I haven't tried yet

+rep to you btw

 

Don't think the manipulating the idle voltage will help much. I get a good 15W difference betwen IGP and 6990m. Maybe you can drop it to 12W but your still looking at much much better results just switching it off.

 

yes it will unlock the overdrive function as well. i've done the same thing on a asus g73 with the 5870...

 

thank you custom90gt, it helps alot


Edit: Any one know how t flash two card in crossfire mode with ati winflash? thanks

 

That's a good question. if it doesn't let you flash one at a time or both at the same time you can either just flash one card at a time by taking the other out, or I believe you can use ati flash to specify which card you want to flash...

 

yeah I usually use atiflash for OC but follow your guide, I think that flash another vbios impact to unlock overdrive process, if not can I use atiflash anytime, and just unlock overdrive option through regedit?

Edit: I've just change the value in regedit, all 3 three values to " ALL" and restart, but it seems I don't see overdrive option in CCC, I'm on 11.8 BTW

Edit 2: Got it already, confirm it works with atiflash too, thank you for all that

 

Unfortunately I don't see the overdrive2 or any of them in my registry. CCC 11.8 preview

 

mine here



I'm on 11.8 too

 

at this point I will create it manually and see if it will do the trick

 

wait for your result!

 

well... created them manually but no luck, no overdrive in CCC. Going to completely remove CCC and reinstall everything.

 

yeah you should do that, if you have an option in regedit, you need to change its value first, than you need to flash your card after if you want to see overdrive option.

Earlier, I changed regedit without flash the card, I didn't have that option in ccc, then I flashed the card, I had it.


Try this one if you want

 

still no option in registry and I still get BSOD, I gonna remove them completely again and try with the 11.7 from AMD's website...

*edit*
just saw your attachment, thanks will give it a try too

 

thanks a lot man, your vbios did the trick.

 

do you get it work?

 

Yep it worked, the overdrive is now available inside CCC (still those keys are missing from the registry btw).

 

I made two another 5870's bios in 1.10 and 1.15V and increase the limitation in overdrive to 930/1270 and 949/1270

 

Now that you have OD enabled bios, try to reinstall the catalyst driver set. It will probably write the registry keys once it founds OD enabled cards

 

In my case it didn't, I created it myself

 

Thank you, this is awesome info!

Maybe you will have some insight into my issue - it's happening more and more lately. My 6970m will only run at 300/900 sometimes. I have to turn Powerplay on and off and on an indeterminate amount of times, combined with unplugging and plugging the power cord a couple times and that makes it run at the normal clocks again. Any idea how to fix this? It's starting to render this rig useless for gaming...

Edit: Actually, now since modding the BIOS, it seems to be unfixable unless I just reboot altogether...

 

It almost sounds like a thermal issue. Have you ran furmark to see what your temperatures look like? Perhaps a repaste is in your near future?

 

Yeah, I've considered that, but it happens spradically no matter what the temps are. And my max in Furmark is 79c (Safe, yes?)

I found a possible culprit... If videos or webpages with videos are up on Firefox int he background, it seems to make my clocks act weird. Will investigate that further.

Am planning a repaste/re-fan (My fan is noisy when my laptop is flat...)

Any other ideas you may have are much appreciated.

Edit: It just went up to 300/900 again, simply while using Firefox...Would not go down to the idle speeds until I closed Firefox. So, I think I have found the culprit... Any ideas on how to prevent this? I don't want to have to leave Firefox closed, well, ever, really!

 

what drivers are you using?

 

I just undervolted to 1v at 720/950 and put everything else down by .5v. with the same clocks except I kept the .9v ones at .9v. You think we could go down to .85 or is .9 the limit they set?

 

The newest ones put out by Dell. I've tried to stay away from the official AMD ones.

 

Sadly .9v is the lowest you can go. I've tried .8 and .85v and it doesn't work, just defaults to .9v.

Did you try the latest drivers Dell put out a couple days ago? I've never seen that issue, but I've never ran Dell's drivers.