Overvolting a 7970m without flashing vBIOS - May work with other GPU's also.

Thanks for the guide, but I have a few questions? What is the difference between Overclocking and overvolting? Wouldnt following Mr. fox's guide to change theMSIAfterburner.cfg allow you to overclock? If not, should I disregard that guide and follow this one? Using this guide, should I return my AB settings back to default?

 

That makes me wonder, maybe first learn the basics.....

Overclocking = making your videocard faster, increasing the clock of the core or/and memory will do it, to much will make it unstable or to hot, depends on the system and videocard.
Overvolting = increasing the voltage of your CORE, so you can overclock further then before, but more voltage is not always good, it can make a video-card unstable or make it generate to much heat so it will shutdown or damage.

 

That's why I asked, so I can learn. I see you answered the first part of my question, mabye you can answer the other part.

 

Power goes up linearly with frequency, it goes up with the square of the voltage.

 

Since there is a outside chance your Warranty might be void from flashing the VBios I see this method as a good alternative and a great way of discovering the limits prior to flashing. Despite that, I feel that flashing the VBios is far more straightforward and stable.
Let me just say be very careful pushing these GPU's, they inheritly do not OC that well and are fragile.

 

Your warranty is void by volt modding at all to be honest.

 

One of the methods lends itself to plausible deniability more so than the other.

 

mmm... it's working

 

For my system does not work correctly. With trixx 4.6.0 i can't change anything - gpu, mem, voltage. Always when i set any frequency (up or down), immediately get back to default.
With trixx 4.3.0 does work changing gpu, memory up, but only sometimes down (don"t know bug). Voltage setting i can change only with power states i guess.
For example gpu 680 - 1,1v -default and also max load, 1.050v ( minimum with trixx 4.3.0), gpu 500- 1.000v, atc. Voltage over 1.1v which is default load voltage i can't pass.
I can't also change fan rpm.
What i wanted: slowing down rpm and voltage @gpu load.

 

Bully! Works for me, even with AB v2.3.1 and on the fly changes. I have a 1.05v default card, but maybe now I have the chance to break 1GHz core one day.

+rep OP, thanks for the info.

 

After a recent deployment i found out that my version of MSI Afterbuner would no longer work, so i downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta 10 and it works exactly the same, so I assume it would work with a few other different versions. And for the record, I have hit 1000/1500 with 1.075V but was definitely not stable. Great news that you guys are having success with this.

 

dont OC ram, just GPU, ram doesnt OC well far beyond 1400MHz for me if I remember correct (or not even beyond 1350)

 

Don't quite understand? Unless you mean don't OC the Memory and only the Core, in which case I get gains going up to 1500 but any higher is unstable at 1.05V....

Has anyone tried this with the Catalyst 13.6 drivers yet? It doesn't work for me, TRIXX has a fit and goes back to stock clocks and no VDDC on display, only way I found to get it to work again is to uninstall MSI Afterburner and reinstall it, and do the -xcl thing again.

 

yes, try to keep memory at lower, it doesnt benefit so much for performance I found myself, better more OC on GPU

did you try use 13.2 B7 modified driver? works best so far

 

I only just got back home last night so I tried the latest driver AMD had, just went back to 13.5 and working fine again.

I will experiment more tomorrow was just curious if anyone else has had luck

 

Worked like a charm! Only thing with my GPU is that I cannot OV it beyond 980mV without it crashing my games, with that voltage however, I was easily able to reach 1000MHz core clock, and its very stable, but I am not able to OC the Memory beyond 1450MHz, even if I do go further than 980mV

 

Worked like a charm! I tried OV'ing my GPU but had no luck getting past 980mV without it starting to crash my games. I did manage to OC the Core clock to 1GHz but sadly I could not increase the memory clock beyond 1450MHz, even if I did go past 980mV.

 

Lets share some benchmarks of 7970m @ 1GHz ?

these were from back in the day with (I think) 12.11 b7 7970MOD driver

 

Do you mean 1.980V? That is a pretty intense OV. After about 1500MHz the gain is negligible anyway.

You will probably find some games will love 1GHz core but others won't, I found more around 930-940 to be stable for all games I own

 

he meant 0.980v , some 7970m's have weird VBIOS that wont like you to OV the card yea and some cards do run stable and some dont with 1GHz, if games crash on certain scenes @ 1GHz GPU core, increase voltage by smallest amount and try again

 

Thats not an OV then thats a UV... and if he is hitting 1GHz on the core with that then that is ridiculous

 

lol, not at all, thats the new vbios I think

 

Would be intrigued but will be 780m SLI before I have to worry about that haha

and here is my score

 

nice score you beaten my score with use of newer drivers and especially higher end CPU and more RAM OC nice , I dont remember what my VRAM was set on but I feel I had it as high as 1350 trouble-free and 1GHz @GPU with i7-2860QM OEM CPU

 

That was on Catalyst 13.5 because I still can't get 13.6 to work correctly

1550 was absolutely pushing it I tried to open Max Payne 3 at that and it red screened straight away

normally I keep it more around 900/1300 because I run into temp problems at higher clocks with VSync off in games

 

to tell the truth I only used these clocks for a very short time, mainly while benchmarking and checking what are the real capabilities of the card I have, and usually I always ran card on all stocks so to maintain the longlivety of the card, sometimes for some games if I really needed some extra FPS I have just OCed the GPU to 940 too and left memory alone since noticed absolutely no increase in performance anywhere in games OCing vram

 

Yeah as long as you hit 60FPS there isnt really much need to push it other than bragging rights

I can push the 3920XM further then 4.2GHz but too many issues and too much heat

 

WEIRD... I have my 3940XM @ 4.4GHz daily at all 4 cores no issues with temps, however Im using ICD24 so maybe that's the key? my max temp ever was 89c on CPU for a few hours long gaming session of Crysis3 with all at ultra , ambient ~20-23c

 

yeah I can run at 4.4GHz daily, even 4.5GHz, until I decide to play GTA4 lol, then all bets are off

the difference between 4.2 and 4.4 is nothing for me anyway

 

well you may be right there as I havent tried GTA4...

 

It is a CPU destroyer, and I can only assume GTA5 will be too

 

Stock VDDC on my card was 0.95v...I thought I could go higher and be stable because your cards are coming with 1/1.05v. Now I can't even get to 0.98 without getting crashed games since last night so I ramped it down a bit to 0.975v.

EDIT: I reduced clocks to 950MHz as well...I won't play around with clocks for a while since I don't want to damage the card but yes, I do agree .98v for 1GHz is ridiculous but it did happen, momentarily, as I was able to play Crysis flawlessly. The next day...not so much

Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2

 

That is awesome to hit that at that voltage, as you can see in that picture I had to go to 1.1V to run at 1GHz with any sort of stability and that was only for a benchmark

Bit strange your card isn't 1.00V too!

 

Yes, indeed, I thought of it as strange as well. I tweaked it again and now surprisingly its running stable at 1GHz with 1.01v and memory clock at 5800MHz...it seems if I either overvolt or increase memory clock my computer either crashes or my games start to stutter very much. I have been OV'ing in increments of 20mV...I'll reduce that to 10mV and see if I can push memory a bit further to 6000MHz. The only two games that I currently play are Crysis 3 and Hitman: Absolution so I don't know of it may react differently to other games..

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I had to overVolt to 1.05v to hit 1GHz, I also managed 1050MHz GPU with same voltage but have forgot to save the score, otherwise it ran ok

 

That is a truely awesome clock, if I had more time and patience I would love to truely test out the limits of the 7970m

Keep up the great work lads

 

Unfortunately this seems useless for users of crossfire systems.
I am also not able to overvolt both cards.
The highest stable clock I can get is 905 / 1475
Would have been nice to get a 950 core speed but anything just slightly higher will crash eventually.

 

You might be better off modifying clock profiles in CCC.

 

I guess what was messing my computer up when I was overclocking memory was my OS? I just reverted back to Windows 7 from 8 and I was quite easily able to OC the GPU to 1000/1500 @1.025v...the only game that I tried, and which was running flawlessly was Crysis 3. I will be doing some benchmarking tomorrow to see if it crashes or not.
EDIT: Add Hitman to the list as well...managed go get an average of 42FPS...ran it three times without the game crashing.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2

 

This worked for me flawlessly. Any over 1500 mem and I'm crashing, but I was able to get my card to 1075/1500 at 1.1v. Now I turned it down to 1000/1500 at 1.025v, my temps and game performance at this oc is great.

 

Have you done performance testing on the memory to make sure you get higher scores up to 1500?

GDDR5 has inbuilt error correction where data is retransmitted, too fast and you don't crash but you retransmit more than you gain in frequency so performance suffers.

 

Good point. Gotta be testing rather than OCing for the sake of OCing. I gain very little above 1400.

 

thanks great write up lif3t4k3r worked perfect

 

thanks mate glad it helped you