Advice: 880m with slv7 vbios

Hey guys

So even though I didn't really need to, I decided to flash my 880m with slv7's vbios. Went smoothly and I proceeded to run 3dmark afterwards to check how it affected the performance of the card.

First thing I noticed is that the core clock jumped from 954 to 993 MHz. As far as my scores, I got a score of 5474 on Firestrike, up from 5353 and a couple hundred points difference on Vantage and 3dmark11.

I am practically at the front of the rankings for similar systems so I think I am done with benchmarking as I think everything's working properly as it should now

Temps did jump from 75 deg on load to ~80 deg but I can live with that. Plus I am still waiting for my cooling pad (thermaltake massive tm) which should reduce temps a bit.

I do have a question though and hope someone can enlighten me. I noticed when checking the few scores higher than mine on firestrike that some systems with lower specs (lower ram, stock bios for the 880m,same nvidia driver...) were getting higher fps (granted 2-3 fps is negligible but I still found this strange).
I've read some articles discussing how some "gold sample' cpu's could have better performance than others, but could this be the case with graphic cards as well?

 

Hi

I'm having problems with my 880m in my alienware 17

Stock bios temps at 93c after 10 mins of gaming. Gpu starts to run at 993mhz then drops to 421mhz and from then on fluctuates between the two.

Strange the FPS remains at around 75 with high settings, the graphs in Msi afterburner are all over the place

Dell have offered to swap mine for a 780m

Not sure what to do, I was hoping the 880m would have been as stable as the 780m


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Could just be that the system was tweaked to the maximum with as minimal overhead as possible.

 

If you google it, you'll see that the 880m is a massive disaster in terms of user experience. You NEED to flash svl7's modded vbios to get it working semi-decently, you NEED to use older drivers, and it's a very hot card so you need to find a way to improve your cooling. Of course you could go down to 780m, and it probably will be more stable, although that card as well needs to be flashed with a modded vbios.

First of all, at those temperatures, you should be looking into making sure your cooling is up to par. Are you using stock dell paste? If yes, repaste with a better thermal compound or film (IC DIamond, Liquid Ultra, MetalPad, Heatspring, etc.).

 

Which drivers do you recommend? I am using the latest (beta) right now. And what's the best procedure to downgrade? Is there some "cleaner" for Nvidia drivers in order to do a clean install of the old drivers?

Thanks!

 

Use DDU uninstaller from guru3d.com. Display Driver Uninstaller Download version 12.9.4.0

 

Alright, thx for this. But do you know which driver I should use in order to get the most out of my card?

By the way, got my Thermaltake Massive TM yesterday. That thing rocks! My GPU temp dropped from 50 to 44 on idle and from a max of 85 to 78 on Firestrike

 

Looking around it seems that flashing the 880M is the only way to really unlock the true potential of this card. I've never flash a GPU before and as such do you know any threads that will help me out getting started? Thanks.

 

You can check out techinferno. That's where you'll get the vbios and detailed steps on how to flash your gpu

 

Thanks I will check that out.

 

Well, I am bit disappointed...

I finally got some time to play a bit of Bioshock Infinite last night All settings on ultra, lock frames off. Performance was insane and was getting upwards of 100 fps most of the time. Had to actually check the settings to make sure I wasn't playing on low or medium... No throttling whatsoever thanks to slv's vbios, BUT my temps reached a max of 92 degrees... And that was with my cooling pad's fans set to turbo...

I am planning to redeploy stock vbios tonight and try again to see what will be the max temp I get. If there's a big difference I might just have to stick to the stock vbios... I really don't want to damage my GPU... Do you reckon repasting would help much here?

In any case I am pretty sure I am going to be upgrading to the 980m this fall... If it's really the beast some people here are describing it to be, then I am definitely going for it.

 

If you continuously game hard (i.e. play games often) that temperature may be detrimental to surrounding components and solder.
I can foresee in the future the need for baking as cold solder joints form due to the high temperatures involved.

Keep us updated on stock vbios temps.

 

Stock vbios shouldn't pass 87C or so.

The 92C is the same reason I don't use the mod myself. You can adjust the temperature target down though but that kills performance and sometimes it will crash the driver.

The best thing to do with Bioshock Infinite if you're going to use the modded vbios is run the game with forced adaptive vsync in the nVidia control panel. It doesn't have the performance hit or regular vsync and it will stop the GPU from heating up so much because it reduces the load massively. With that particular game you should be able to run 60 FPS @ 85C or so with the full 993MHz boost clock the entire time.

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@Ethrem
That's exactly what I was going to try tonight with that game! Will update you later with the results

 

Works great for any game significantly over 60 FPS but for games like Watch Dogs, no dice.

For some reason Bioshock Infinite is extremely effective at turning the heat up though. It kicks my 780 Ti up on my desktop too without vsync but since that system is only hooked to my LCD TV, I force adaptive anyway.

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Well color me surprised!

I just finished a bit of testing of different settings for Bioshock Infinite. I didn't flash back to stock vbios as I didn't needed to...

I started off my test by using Nvidia Inspector to set Vsync Tear Control to "Adaptive". Temps maxed out at 87 degrees after 20 minutes with max frame rate of around 75 (frames locked on off in Bioshock options). But the big issue here was the tearing. It was horrible. I tried setting VSync Smooth AFR to "on" but it didn't help.

I ended up going back to default settings and simply enabling "frame lock" in the Bioshock options. Framerate got locked at 60 frames and....after playing for 30 minutes my max temp was of 73 degrees And next to ZERO tearing.

I would've never imagined that removing the frame lock would lead to a difference of practically 20 degrees...

Anyway I am pretty happy right now and will be sure not to mess with this option in any game. Sure it's nice to see how powerful your graphic card but I'll take a smooth 60fps gameplay with sub 80 deg temps over anything else!

Edit: Just wanted to add that core clock was @ 993Mhz at all times. Didn't fluctuate like in Murdered Soul Suspect

 

Odd that adaptive vsync didn't do it for you, that's what i use in the nVidia control panel as a global setting and it locks at 60 (actually it's 59.9) and works perfectly.

Glad to hear the game setting dropped your temps though. Bioshock can really be an inferno.

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Can someone please give me the bios?

 

I'm also interested in trying slv7 vbios, as shown in my sig I have an 880M and I've been playing crysis 3 for a bit now and have seen some throttling. the temps don't go past 80C but sucks I can't put the settings on very high. It runs without throttling with settings on high and the temps don't go past 77C.