6990m Undervolt Achieved

Just posting to state that I have achieved a good stable undervolt on my 6990m. All clocks except 400/900 and 500/900 (which both run on .95, down from 1.05) run on .9V (down from 1.0-.95v), and the max clocks of 715/900 have been brought down to 1.0V down from 1.1V. Fan stays fairly quiet now under full load, which is nice!

Quick Tut:
Download my package here: 6990m Undervolt Package.zip
You will find RBE, the radeon bios editor tool, ATI winflash, and the VBIOS folder.

Step 1: Open RBE, load your bios. I have included 2 bios files in the VBIOS folder: the stock rom, and my personal modded rom.

Step 2: Edit clocks/voltages as necessary

Step 3: Open ATI Winflash, navigate to your modded bios file

Step 4: Flash it! Then, reboot

Note: You must be using your 6990m to use ATI winflash, or else it will not find your graphics card

Good luck, and happy modding!

UPDATE
Stress tested my modded rom, and holding stable at 1.0V and max clocks

UPDATE 2
Ok some people seem to be taking this the WRONG way. This vbios has modded to run the MAX STOCK PERFORMANCE at a significantly LOWER power consumption value. There is no sacrifice in performance! You only lose heat and power consumption, not performance! I've also been able to perform a small overclock at the same 1.0V, from 715/900 up to 750/950

 

What's the point of all this? Educate me.

 

Voltage=Power=Heat

Less voltage = less of all the above

-> lower temps (which possibly leads to less noise), less power draw, and if you go too low, also less stability

 

It's usually wanted for when you go on battery to help increase battery life, but in the case of the m17x, you will most likely be on intel's chip instead, negating any advantages the changes you made would have given you.

Quieter fans and cooler to the touch when plugged in is nice though.

I'd like to see a test of the battery life under load with the underclocked 6990m forced. Any chance you can test that for us?

 

Id avoid winflash and flash under a dos boot usb stick.

 

The undervolt is to reduce heat and fan noise. I just stress tested my system, and its noticeably cooler and quieter under full load, which I find to be a nice benefit. As everybody knows, heat is the enemy of all electronics.

 

I want my r3 to perform to its max performance. Anything less than that is unacceptable for me. I bought my r3 to enjoy its power. To undervolt it to reduce heat and fan noise while sacrificing performance aint my thing. I dont have issue with heat and fan noise of my r3. But to each his own good luck guys!

 

No run gaming laptop at less-than-max power! Hulk want MOAR POWER, not less. Hulk confused.

 

Provided the undervolt is stable it won't affect the performance at all, but you won't be able to overclock as high as with stock voltage.

 

Not power as in performance, but as in power draw. You will be @ stock clocks still with no performance loss, but you will have less power draw, temperatures, fan noise. Performance will still be the same as if you didn't undervolt or do anything. Temps and power draw will be reduced. (It really is a win/win in this situation.) If you wanted to OC you will have to raise the voltages back up.

 

I'm not planning on running games when off the AC. If I want mobile battery I switch to IGP.

 

Well you will add a very short amount of time lol.

Why not just run it at power saving clocks, I am sure the performance is still ok, but it will make more of a difference.

 

FYI with the card completely off you more than double battery time. I've seen it compared 1.5h versus 4. Even undervolting on battery your probably going to get like 30 minutes in game.

 

it has been proven by other forum members that undervolting will lower your performance.
eg
1v 700/1000 is slower than 1.05v 700/1000, not by much, but still its slower

 

please show me results that show that difference at same clocks. I'd be very surprised if there is a difference outside the margin of error (repeat-ability) of the test. It doesn't make any logical sense.

 

this is simply untrue. Somebody on here posted 3dmark vantage results for a completely stock card, unmodded, and my card still managed to beat the score while undervolted from 1.1 to 0.96
I will be conducting more tests when time permits, I'm not entirely disproving your statement. There are exceptions for everything

I do see major benefits in temperature reduction though. Full clocks for temp sensors 1 and 2 never break 63, temp sensor 3 occasionally hits 70, but hovers around 68-69

 

what room temp u have??thx.

 

well.... when i was back in good old MSI house we have had couple of persons that stated their 5870m's being weaker a bit becouse of voltage being reduced.....yes...maybe it works like that for some users and for some not...couldn't find the post though

 

That's pure fiction, as voltage can only affect stability, not performance. I do believe that people stated that, but their claims were inaccurate. Lowering the voltage can affect stability, but not raw performance. If you stress test and it passes, you're good to go.

The main point I think being missed here is that less heat means longer laptop life, as well as less of a chance you melt it on a hot day.

 

if you undervolt, you can forget about overclocking...so this isn't for me. Anyways, my gpu temps have now dropped ~10-15c after the repaste so i'm not too concerned about temps

 

10-15c???? with what paste???

 

i used IC diamond 7. The stock paste job on both the CPU and GPU were laughable. There was this grey white goo on there and it was so thin, it was practically metal on metal.

It was disgusting.

If anyone is reading this and they haven't done a repaste job, please do it. It will take a novice about an hour...took me 30 mins to do both CPU and GPU

I just did a run of 3dmark vantage...max CPU was 69, max GPU was 67

 

thats crazy. i repasted icd24 and i still broke 75 when the computer was lifted.... you really gained 10-15 on just a repaste? can you repaste mine?

 

Not saying the paste job was good but isn't it supposed to be as thin as possible?
My understanding was that thermal paste is there to fill in the gaps and micro-valleys between the CPU/GPU and heatsink surfaces. The efficacy of thermal paste is not necessarily related to its thickness. Its function is to maximize contact area. If anything, you run the risk of having air bubbles if the paste is too thick.

 

yes...10-15c. Under load, the GPU was often going into the low to mid 80's. Now it doesn't break 70. So I'm not exaggerating.

 

yes you are correct. But the stock job was way too thin. There was practically no paste on there at all. I was NOT exaggerating when i said it was practically metal on metal

As long as you get good contact between the die and the copper heatsink you'll be fine. Often times, the heatsink isn't flat so if the layer of paste is too thin you will lose contact. Also the thermal pads may prevent good contact so there is a little experimentation involved.

I've repasted the GPU twice already. The first time, my temps dropped 8-10 but i wasn't happy with it as i did a rushed job. This time, i took my time, made sure there was good contact of the thermal pads to the ram and VRMs. And i made sure i put enough paste on there. IC-7 is so thick and hard to work with. I may go back to AS5 next time

 

Will this Undervolt package work for 6907m as well?

 

No, only the 6990, not the 6970. If you flash the vbios, to your 6970, you run the risk of bricking your card. You can however use ATI flash to pull your 6970 vbios and edit the voltage and reflash it to undervolt your 6970. Same Idea as the original post. No performance loss at stock clocks, but a quiter system with less heat is the result.

 

Thank you sooo much for the info!! I will ask for advice when I get my hands on my system... lots of modding to do

 

No prob, just let us know what your looking to do. If you want to undervolt or overclock, I'll walk you through the steps. At least for the GPU if your getting an R3, I don't know much about sandy bridge CPU overclocking, but know plenty about 1st gen i-7 cpus

 

I'm not sure if it's going to be an R3 or a Malibal Veda (Clevo P180HM)... guess i'll overclock... I'm not sure yet

 

I undervolt my P150hm and after restart i see only message: Error sending End Of Post message to ME
Cannot boot from CD, only I can start Bios by F2. not even reset bios to default helped. What can I do? I used your made vbios. Is there way to flash it back from dos? To usa bootable usb or such? Please help i bought my machine internationaly.

 

I undervolt my P150hm and after restart i see only message: Error sending End Of Post message to ME
Cannot boot from CD, only I can start Bios by F2. not even reset bios to default helped. What can I do? I used your made vbios. Is there way to flash it back from dos? To usa bootable usb or such? Please help i bought my machine internationaly.

 

I would reflash back to your original vbios. The one in the guide was a Dell vbios, which isn't recognized by your system. I have Clevo cards for my system and am running the Clevo vbios.

Try downloading this vbios and flashing it with a bootable USB drive.

Use the master vbios, 6990M

 

This will give the instructions to overclock, but you can get enough of it to flash your vbios, plus it includes all the tools needed.

 

problem is that it does not boot from CD neither from USB. i did everything right to make that |USB stick bootable but it just pops up that error message. only thing i think would work to put my video card to dell alienware and if that will boot than flash it back to clevo... because in my clevo it simply doesn't even finishes post screen, where it usually looks for bootable devices. in another computer that USB stick boots right to c:

 

Do you have another system to test it out on? Are you under warranty? Perhaps you can find somone to flash the card for you in your area. That would be ideal.

 

Hi guys,

I just bought 2x6990Ms from ebay, should have bought the 6970s instead but too late for that so for the way ahead I have one little question.
Am I to use the Clevo vBios?
The only info I have is: "We know this card will work on the following brands: Eurocom, Sager, Alienware, Dell" and the cards were bought from "upgradeyourlaptop" based in Canada. I want to stay as remote as possible to bricking these babies if possible
Thanks!

 

I can't flash my Clevo 6990M (bought from upgradeyourlaptop also) with a Dell vbios, well I can via DOS but the result is a black screen after I boot windows.

You have to use the Clevo vbios.

Any ideas how I can get audio to work from HDMI out? D:

 

Audio doesn't work over HDMI unless you have a Dell 6990 Master card and crossfire is disabled I believe. aarpcard has one Clevo and one Dell card with the dell in the master and Audio over HDMI works for him, but he has to use a third party app for fan control due to the dell card. Clevo cards won't work with audio over HDMI. No fix. It's a trade off. Manual fan control or audio over HDMI.

Here is a link to the clevo vbios. If you want to undervolt you'll need to do so with RBE

 

auahuahuahuah

 

sorry to be digging up this thread.
i undervolted my clevo's 6990m but i pulled and edited the bios from my own card and set the voltages to the same as the one TS provided with.

just telling people who have doubts with performance issues that theres nothign to worry about,as predicted by ts, i had exactly the same 3dmark11 score with the same clocks but different volts, no stability issues either ive been playing bf3 for hours.

even better news i dropped 4c off my max load temp.

highly recommended for those who like to run at stock clocks.

i also recommend that you extract your own bios and edit the voltages yourselves to keep the compatibility issues to a minimum.

 

I indeed found a very little difference between standard and lower voltage when it comes to "benchmarking". Thanks to technos' instructions I was able to flash my 6990m (clevo, no alienware with his voltage settings and it runs like a charm, way more silent. I played around with msi kombustor and the only thing I noticed when running the 1920x1080 benchmark (runs for approx. 2 minutes) was a slightly higher score, when I used the standard voltage of 1.1V. However the result had no impact towards fps rate. Then I activated "show fps" in Serious Sam BFE3 to find out if there´s a difference, i.e. fps rate. Nothing. Finally I created two gpu profiles in sapphire trixx (715/900/1.0V, 800/1050/1.1V). Result: 35 vs. 38 frames. Meh...3 frames fps bonus and extremely high temperature (~75-83°C vs ~90-96°C). I don´t know about m17x bios fan tables, but the p170hm runs with 100%fan speed, some seconds after reaching 96°C. I was impressed by how low the temperature was and by the "silent" fan, after undervolting, so thanks again to technos! Last but not least, when I do anything but gaming, I activate the energy save plan in w7 which results in 42°C idle temp @0.9V

 

Will give this a shot this evening on my 6990m. I need to bring temps down just a bit in my w860cu during my longer gaming sessions.

 

Did the undervolt off my own vBios and just finished a nice few rounds of BF3 online. Saw top temps of 83 from the main GPU temp sensor, highest was 90 from sensor 2, a great improvement from before where I would not be able to game for more than 30 minutes or so! Thanks alot!

 

If those temps are with an undervolt, you should really consider repasting that GPU. When I ran my 6990s undervolted, i never had any temp exceed 75°C while gaming...max...for hours on end. Even while running Folding@home, which holds the GPU at 100% maxed out for weeks/months on end.

 

It's a quality job with IC5, but I will be redoing it when I get some nicer thermal pads in later this week and I redo the pads on the memory/other parts. Also, remember we have two different laptops

 

OK I don't know why, but I can't seem to get this undervolting thing to stick.

Using a boot disk, I pulled my original bios and modded it using RBE. The only thing that I changed in RBE is the Clock Info 00 setting, from 1.1 voltage to 1. I saved this new bios back to the bootdisk, rebooted computer using the boot disk, and flashed the new bios. After it prompts me for a reboot to finish flash, I take out the bootdisk and hit cntrl+alt+delete to reboot to windows.

In windows, I pull open GPUZ, CPUID HW Monitor, and RBE to check things out. RBE looks fine. I download the current bios from GPUZ and then open that file with RBE as well and it all matches up.

I then open up a game to stress test, and at first everything is smooth and voltage is staying at 1. However, after a minute or two, the voltage jumps back up to 1.1. ! Please see a screenshot of this below.

Any ideas? I really need to get a handle on the heat from this card, so I would appreciate any thoughts on why this voltage setting is not keeping the card in check. Is there some checkbox that I missed somewhere within RBE or CCC?

EDIT: I figured it out! I just had to uncheck a box on CCC that said "enable overdrive"
Now I am stable at 1v max and 85 max C I will prob try to lower voltage a bit more just because.

Thanks for this!

 

Could someone kindly reupload the files in the first post?

Thank you.

 

Hi, sorry to dig up an old thread.

How do you test for stable voltages and clock settings? I'm afraid of just throwing my 6990m at a .95 with a 600/900 setting and maybe screw something up if I just do so. Reason for this is I get shutdowns at the following temps at 1v.

Core: 87 C
memio: 86.5 C
shader: 89 C


Paste job is fine and I use IC7.
Thermal pads are all good too.
I live in a hot country and I'm willing to sacrifice *some* performance in terms of clock settings just so I can rack up a game's settings to whatever the settings will allow.

Thanks.