6970m Overclock Newb - 850/1100 - need help

Hi everyone, Last time I've been on the forum was when I was just buying the computer so forgive my newbidity (I made that up). So I decided to stop in and perhaps get a convo going and hopefully gain some knowledge from you guys.


Recently I decided that my 6970 stock was not enough for many games as B3 didnt play well maxed out and so hasn't ME3 so I looked into overclocking, I lurked and lurked, read page after page of info and jumped right in.

So long story short, so far I got up to 850/1100 and have been running this clock for about 2 hours with about 30 minutes of Battlefield 3 and 2 3dmark11 runs, and for some apparent reason my temp is not passing 58c on idle and 67-68 the second after a benchmark or game session - then drops back down to under 60.



So my question is, has anyone pushed it beyond this point and had no issues? Is it stable/safe? Am I missing something with these temps? Perhaps misunderstanding something?

Also how much further can I go without frying my m17xr3?

from what I have been reading people are getting high 70 degree idles at this clock, so why is my laptop so cool?

thanks guys.

 

Wow thats pretty high to run! I use to have the 6970m and never ran it that high. With my 6990m I only OC it to 825/1125. You should lower your clocks, cuz those temps dont seem right. Have you changed the fan speed at all?

If your looking for an upgrade I'm gonna be selling my 6990m as soon as my 7970m gets in, if your interested. Anyhow, trixx is what I use as well.

 

Thanks for responding! I was starting to think I was not going to get one ,


Well i bumped it up to 870/1100 and ran occt for 2 minutes, temp jumped to 80 and i cancelled out. Then dropped back to 850/1100 and ran for about 7min temp went to 78 and dropped to 75 as the fans kicked in.

I set the fans to be a little more active than stock and have them at 100% at 80 degrees, about to set them to be 100% at 75 and see how that goes.

I should have mentioned I have my r3 elavated on top of a very basic cooler so that should aid with why its running so cool.

I noticed that in bf3 some areas seem to look hazy, i could not figure out wether it was smoke in game or my VC starting to act up, so ill try to run bc3 in windowed mode and watch those temps.

One thing that I was wondering is that i have seen some people running lower clocks and getting 3dmark11 scores in the 4,000s with the same configs and sometimes inferior processors while im only getting 3,800 combined ( p3806) would anyone help me understand that? I heard there are some settings that aid that?

How much do you want for your 6990? i was actually looking at the 7970 but if the price is right I might reconsider!

Thanks again for the responce!

 

If your starting to notice artifacts and weird pixelation while playing games, I would drop the core clock down 10-15. When I had the 6970m, I was trying to play Witcher 2 at 850mhz on the core clock and it froze so i dropped it too 825 and it was pretty stable. Have you repasted your GPU yet? That will help you as well as replacing the thermal pads on the memory. My temps with the 6990m OCed are 65 on the core and 72-74 on the memory. Thats while playing Crysis 2, BF3, and using the Heaven Benchmark 2.5.

As far as the 3dmark11 score, you might want to change your driver, or see what driver they were using cuz that has a noticeable effect.

I dont know how much I would sell the 6990m yet. Have to see where the market price is, but I would say it will probably be around $300-$350 considering the 7970m is going for around $550-$600. I will post it in the marketplace when I do sell it.

 

That score differential is most probably due to the so-called "tess cheat", which involves turning tessellation off in the display driver. In CCC under Gaming>3D Performance Settings, go the Tessellation section and uncheck both AMD Optimized and Use Application Settings. That's usually worth at least 400-500 points in 3DMark11, with the differential increasing as clocks are increased..