7970m...how high can it overclock?

a few members on the Alienware boards have been experimenting with overvolting the card through vbios manipulation. And it has proven to be successful so far.

It appears that the best voltage to be at right now is 1.075 - 1.1v

Stock is 1.05v

so more juice means higher core clocks, but there are dimishing returns the higher you go up in voltage

I think they are shooting for 1100core, but i don't know how well they did or if it was stable

 

Well I have my rework to increase maximum juice to the GPU

 

It seems a lot is going to depend on the design of the power supply circuits for the GPU... so overvolting results may vary a lot between different systems. I'm curious to see what's possible.
Unfortunately my M15x doesn't like it a lot.

 

The M15X has always had a bit of weak spot for that sort of thing unfortunately....

Will be interesting to see.

 

Lol cheers! Interesting news about MXM 3.1. PCI-E 2.0 16x lanes is far from being bottlenecked though as of yet right? I hope so as I won't want to be bottlenecking any expensive future GPU upgrade lol.

 

Ivy Bridge PCI-Express Scaling with HD 7970 and GTX 680 Review | techPowerUp

 

So since that is desktop comparison it seems to be safe to assume that the laptop versions have 1-2 gens before PCIe 2.0 8x is caped.

 

Considering the 7970 runs at 97% at 16x 1.1 don't worry.

 

yes but laptops only work at 8x PCIe 2.0 so they are already at 97% for the desktop but obviously the 7970m is not like the 7970...its more like the 7850 or 7870. Thats why i said you got room for 1-2 more gens before caping 8x PCIe 2.0

 

Mine works at 16x gen2.....

 

so whats the deal now? are our mobile GPUs getting the full 16 gen 2 lanes or are those the total system lanes that are shared among different components, thus leaving the gpu to deal with just, say, 8 lanes out of the theoretical 16?

 

No, notebooks today have 16 lanes from the cpu to graphics, either 1x16 or 2x8.

 

ok because others here have made it sound different then this. So on every single GPU set up its 16x but crossfire/sli is 2x8

 

So I've followed Slick's OC guide to unlock Afterburner. Updated the .cfg file and reg keys... but the clocks are locked when I open Afterburner at 850 core/1200 memory (stock). What am I doing wrong?

Note: I'm using a p150em, not an m17x. Wanted to stick with my m17x, but had to let it go since I was getting laughed out of meetings at work

 

Have you restarted ? It should def work then.

 

lol, nice one! thats deff one of clevo´s strengths, the subtle and hidden powah style

 

Restarted, but still locked at stock clocks

 

harmattan, double check that you didn't miss a 000 reg key and that your cfg file saved properly. Also remove leading and ending spaces in the:

UnofficialOverclockingEULA=I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
UnofficialOverclockingMode=1

 

Checked and rechecked, then checked again... still no go.

I do only have two 000x keys: 0001, 0002. Only 0002 has the EnableUlps in it. There is an "EnableUlps_NA", but that's a Reg_SZ.

 

hmmm, that's strange. Lots of people overclocking using this method...granted, most of them are running on Alienware m17's, but it shouldn't make a difference because this is a Window's/MSI thing. There may be something specific in the Clevo that is preventing this to work. can you attach 2 pics...your config file where you make the declaration and a pic of your 0002 reg key EnableULps

 

my max overclock is 1020/1650 stable in 3dmark11 and bf3. Adding voltage just causes screen flicker. 1075v is my sweet spot, check my sig for scores

 

those clocks are just insane ure one lucky b a s t a r d!

 

holy **** that is indeed insane! .. dat 7970M oh god, my 8600M GT seems reasonably retarded now

 

Halo God I can't believe you got tthe vram to 1650... That's some skillz my friend. Great work my guess is there's going to be a rare one that handles 1.1ghz core at 1.1v-1.075v. That's truly a nice sample of the 7970m. That die shrink has worked wonders.

 

Can 7970M performs the same performance as desktop 7870 at the same clock?

 

yes it can, thats essentially what it is, a desktop 7870 in a laptop(well atleast at my clocks). Actually i think i score even higher than a desktop 7870 stock. Since i bought my U3 cooler i will be messing a little more with voltages and try to even clock higher. Like i said earlier, i want to hit 7k in 3dmark11, im very close.

 

I don't see why not. The two are the exact same except for the clocks.

 

ya bro, like the others have said, it is a 7870 desktop, Actually, at those clocks, the 7970m is actually faster than a stock desktop 7870.

I've never overvolted. The stock voltage is 1.05v. it seems that the most optimum is 1.075v which is a very minor increase. Most people with slight voltage tweak are able to achieve 1ghz core.

i've never had a need to because my card reaches 1ghz core on stock voltage. i can run through vantage, 3dmark11 and unigine at 1ghz core. And i can play most games at 995core

 

still reading this lol...so you guys did figure out how to overvolt it?

 

yup. Thanx to SVL7 for the vbios tweaks and widezu for the testing.

We can also undervolt...so compatibility in the m17x R2 is almost assured

 

The clocks HaloGod overclocked up to are a 20% increase. His 3dMark11 score is a 24% increase. Generally OC'ing gives you a smaller %performance gain than the clock. Did you change anything else? Tinker with the drivers or something?

 

nope stock drivers and stock cpu. Everything stock clocks except the 7970m
edit: keep in mind my memory overclock, upping the bandwidth on this card gives massive performance jumps

 

so what are you looking at with overvolting and such? What are the upper limits for voltage and clocks? hitting 1000 or slight breaking is nothing new...it was done on stock voltage.

 

yes over 1000mhz has been done but how about hitting 1650 on memory stable? I even had a successful 3dmark11 run at 1675 memory. And my voltage is at 1075v. Anything above that and i get screen flicker.

 

what about core? does that memory really even help for games? isn't core more important?

 

for some reason, the bandwidth of this GPU plays a much bigger role in performance. Upping the memory from a 1500 overclock to 1675 gave me a couple hundred more points in 3dmark11. Core is important but so is the memory on this chip. Yes, its strange, since my two desktop 7970 cards dont see this much of a benefit from overclocking the VRAM.

now in actual games? maybe not much as much, but for benching its big. My bandwidth is currently well over 205 GB/s, forgot the actual number.

 

generally yes, but as was mentioned several tiems here before already, in the case of the 7970M a memory overclock DOES help scores immensely. seems like at stock mem clock the 7970M is hindered bandwidth-wise.

 

lol. your guy's post were neck and neck. Cool but have you tried uping the core more?

 

Even if you go to 1.1v, you won't be able to get the core much higher stable. We had a prominent nbr member try for 1100 mhz with voltage over 1.1v, but his 3dmark11 scores were lower. So the card is maxing out somewhere. Too much voltage and too high a clock will hinder performance it seems

Memory on the 7970m should really be at 1400 minimum. unlike the 6990m where boosting the vram over 1080mhz didn't really increase performance much, on the 7970m, the core is powerful enough to make use of the additional bandwidth. For me, with the core @ 1ghz, going above 1.48ghz vram doesn't make much of a difference

 

That could be your ram starting to error out though. Each card will have to be tested individually.

 

This seems so weird! Yeah like Meaker said, if the RAM gets maxed out, the scores wouldn't go up but they shouldn't go down. Scores shouldn't drop significantly unless.......are we comparing two similar RAMs? There are two or three manufacturers of VRAMs on these 7970ms right? That could be the difference.

 

Didnt know there was different manufaturers of the VRAM , even at 1675 I get more performance , like it never wants to stop ! I might bump the core down and go for higher VRAM just to see if it will go over 1700

 

this weekend, when i get some time, I'm going to do some experiments with how high i can bump my memory. Halo, your vram must have come from the secret alienware factory in Area 51, cause it is INSANE

 

GDDR5 detects errors and retransmits, once you push your ram (or IMC too far) it spends more time retransmitting than actually sending new data and so your performance goes down.

 

1 card? because i know for a fact that that wouldn't fly for 2.. and im hard pressed to believe that for one..

 

yes its in my m17x r4 so one card only

 

can you link me your vantage run with that setting please.. and the vbios you are using?

 

yes ill download vantage now

 

question wont these scores go up to once they get better drivers for this? Did you guys read the review from notebookcheck.net. It played all games maxed except 1/2 but wouldn't that change with new drivers? I have heard several people say the drivers are very poor in its current state.

 

yes drivers are new and poor, the potential of this card has yet to be shown