Overclocking the Radeon 6770m in the dv6t 61xx

**If you have a dv60xx model, just jump to step 7 for overclocking since you can already manually switch.**

HP just released a bios update that allows us to do manual switching, which is required for overclocking. The lack of manual switching is what has caused all the fuss over the past couple of months in the new 61xx series. That is no longer an issue and OpenGL applications now work too!

Steps:

0. Please update to the latest graphics drivers! Some people are reporting that they are more successful with 11.5b. You can try both 11.7 and 11.5b if you would like. Please post your results.

1. Download the latest BIOS update from HP. It is F.1A. The date associated with the download is 7/22/11

2. Run the BIOS update. Do not turn off your computer during the update and make sure your laptop is plugged in! Let the computer reboot itself into Windows after you complete the update.

3. Enable manual switching. This is done in the BIOS menu. You can enter this by hitting ESC as the computer starts before the Windows startup animation.

4. Find the Switchable graphics setting. I forget which tab it is in. You need to change it from Dynamic to Fixed.

5. Reboot into Windows. Fire up Catalyst Control Center.

6. In the Switchable graphics section, you can now pick between the Intel 3000 HD and the Radeon 6770m manually. This is what we want. You should run on the 3000HD when you are not gaming or doing GPU intensive tasks. You should know what these are.

**You can stop here if you don't want to overclock**

7. Download MSI Afterburner from Here.

8. Extract the download.zip and run MSIAfterburnerSetup210.exe. Let it install, but DO NOT RUN IT YET!You must uncheck the box at the end of the installation.

9. Open Wordpad with admin privileges. Do this by searching for it in the start menu and right clicking.

10. Open MSIAfterburner.cfg in C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI Afterburner

11. Change this block

Code:

[ATIADLHAL]
UnofficialOverclockingEULA =
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 0
AccessibilityCheckingPeriod = 0

to this:

Code:

[ATIADLHAL]
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
AccessibilityCheckingPeriod = 0

12. Save that file and you can open up MSI Afterburner.

13. Congrats! You can now change the sliders in MSI Afterburner to overclock. People with 60xx models have a thread Here with overclocks they have found to be stable. The Overclocks are listed as CoreClock/MemoryClock

DON'T GO BLINDLY TESTING OTHER PEOPLE'S OVERCLOCKS! SLOWLY RAMP YOUR CLOCKS UP!

So far, I have found 850Mhz Core Clock and 900Mhz Memory Clock to be stable. YMMV

edit: 8/3 update: I have found 850Mhz Core and 1000Mhz Memory to be stable without any voltage changes. That mem clock could be too high for most.


Please post your results!
Feel free to +Rep if this helped.

I am going to be running some benchmarks shortly. I hope you found this post helpful. Please post a reply with your findings/tips/suggestions/questions. Remember I am new to this too, so I may not be able to help you too well as I am still learning myself.

Icons for Manual Switching:

 

Nice. +rep.

What are your CPU and GPU temps during gaming with the OC?

 

No clue. Honestly I haven't gamed more than 5 minutes to see if FPS went up. I am gonna clear my CoreTemp and run a bench with and without overclock and see the difference in score/temp.

 

It would be interesting to see if you can push 3dmark11 to 1800 and 3dmark vantage to 7500+. That would potentially put it on the level of a GTX 460m.

 

+rep. Looking forward to your benchmarks.


@jaguare2 : That would be amazing. Not keeping my hopes too high though...

 

New to this Overclocking deal. What are the risks I'm taking if I overclock my GPU?

 

Ok. Here are my first round of tests:

This is 3DMark11

Stock Clocks: P1576 3DMarks, Combined score 1367

Overclock 875/900: 1844 3DMarks, Combined score 1600

Obviously it is functional. I think I will try to push a bit higher.

 

How about the temps? By the way I do not know exactly what the combined score means but most people tend to consider the overall P 3dmark score and then the graphics score.

 

Overclocking is *at your own risk* - especially if you need to increase voltage. It can reduce the life of your GPU. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but you shouldn't do it without knowing a little bit about what you are doing.

 

It's the overvolting that reduces the life of your GPU, and can ultimately kill it. If you overclock with the stock volt or undervolting, there shouldn't be any negative consequences.

 

The only "risk" is increased temperatures, though that's more of a given instead of a risk.

Constant overheating/high temps can be bad for your computer though.

 

You'll probably be fine heatwise OCing the GPU, I know mine rarely gets very warm.

 

Driver version - 11.7b

Dynamic mode: 3DMark11 Graphics Score = 1343
Manual mode stock clocks (725/800): 3DMark11 Graphics Score = 1376
Manual mode overclocked (875/1000): 3DMark11 Graphics Score = 1647

These are the graphics subscores, not the total score.

 

Hey guys, I'm new to the concept of overclocking.

How complicated of a process is it? Does it require a bunch of external programs running while the games running to overclock it?

What sort of improvements does overclocking bring? Are they major improvements, 10+ FPS gains, or minor gains like 5 FPS?

What are the disadvantages to overclocking? How badly can your computer heat up? If you don't know what you're doing, can you screw up your system?

 

You basically need MSI Afterburner and a temperature monitoring program (hwmonitor, gpu z, coretemp, etc.)

Advantages is a performance boost. You can certainly see 10+ fps games with a good enough overclock.

Disadvantages is that your computer will heat up. If you don't know what you're doing, but don't do anything stupid, you won't screw it up. If you do something stupid like jack up the clocks without looking at temps, then you will screw it up. If you overvolt, this is beyond the manufacturer's recommended power spec and can have negative consequences for the life of the GPU.

 

so excited, im doing this right now

all i want is a 7.0* score in the windows experience index xD

i have a question, does msi afterburner have to be on all the time to get the overclock?

update: went from 6.9 to 7.1 after a pretty small overclock to 850/940

 

where have you got 11.7b version drivers?

 

I've been toning down my overclock because while playing SC2, the game will freeze up for 10 seconds or so and AMD will tell me the driver stopped working but it recovered. It's either caused by the fixed mode, or more likely, my overclock.

Whats the easiest way to find out the best, most stable overclock?

 

Use furmark for a couple minutes every time you change the clocks to make sure it's stable.

After you reach your highest stable clock, run furmark for like 30-60 mins to make sure it's solid, if it fails work your way down.

But that's if you want to really thorough, no game really stresses the GPU like furmark does. You can really replace furmark with any other GPU stressing program. Keep an eye on your thermals too, wouldn't want your notebook to overheat. Since the heatsink is shared, your GPU temps will also affect your CPU temps.

 

Furmark doesn't guarantee stability. It is definitely stressful though but it runs a pattern over and over again. It's a good starting point, but you need to play your games and see if they are stable or not.

There are typically more sensitive games Battlefield:BC2 which like to crash if your setup is in any way unstable.

 

Hi guys, so happy the bios update is out and we now have control again!

If you could please post temp differences when overclocking, it would be appreciated

I'm going to give con's first oc results a try now, thanks

 

My temps reached 89 for GPU and 93 CPU using furmark on 800/850 OC.

Thats super higher, guess i shouldn't oc.

 

Yeah that's pretty hot. Have you tried setting coolsense on coolest?

 

The memory OC seems to make a MUCH bigger difference on the 6770m (up to 20FPS in MSI Kombustor and 10+ FPS in games). Based on my testing, relative to temperature, I'm keeping my DV7T at 800/950, which nets me an 83F GPU temp. 825mhz on the core gave me 1 extra FPS, whereas no noted FPS improvement was made going to 850mhz, but at both settings the GPU temp jumped by 3 to 4 degrees. 3DMarkVantage turned in a P7420 with the most recent stock .2000 drivers (still the most reliable for me) at 850/975, which was the highest I could reliably go at the 850 gpu. I'll have to see if I can hit 1000 on the mem, if I bump the gpu down to 800. At current everyday setting of 800/950, the 3DMarkVantage was P7215. Not quite GTX460m performance, but pretty darn close.

 

No i use performance optimized. I think coolest mode throttles cpu and gpu performance.

 

89 for the GPU isn't blistering, 93 for the CPU is a bit crispy though. Are you at 100% fan?

 

Well the fan is loud, but furmark and msi afterburner shows the fan at 30% which is obviously wrong.

What fan monitoring software do you recommend?

Anyway, on coolest mode temps don't exceed 80 for GPU and 77 for CPU using furmark. But like i said before, i think that's due to performance throttling and disabling turbo boost.

 

I have so far found 850/900 to be much more stable than 875/900. 875mhz on the core would keep crashing my drivers.

 

Yea i was having the same problem so i went down to 850/875 and it seems to be running nice now. Also i do not believe the fan speed showing in MSI AB to be correct, i tried adjusting the fan speed but it did not change. I wonder if that is still locked or if another piece of software could control it properly.

 

I was struggling to modify the fan speed too. I don't believe there is a dedicated GPU fan. I would be surprised if it had one. Even if I lock it to 100% speed, I don't hear a change. I am going to stay with 850/900 for awhile. I think raising the memory clock improves performance more than the core clock. Dropping 875 to 850 didn't make a noticeable difference in FSX... 50FPS+ is fine. A few more doesn't make it any better.

 

Anyone have some in-game benchmarks? Would love to see the stock FPS vs OC FPS in a game like crysis.

 

Rift:

Stock: 1920x1080, high settings, no AA ~18fps
OC: 850/875, same settings ~21 fps.

So i only gained about 2 fps for this overclock?. I am wondering if it is even overclocked or not, 2-3 fps is not a vast improvement over the stock clocks. Now of course that is at 1080p resolution so maybe i wouldn't notice much of a difference anyway?, i dunno.

 

Bump the memory clock to 900. And that is 3FPS btw.

 

this is almost a 20% increase in performance...

 

True. You should be happy with a 16.6% performance increase. Especially free of charge and software based.

 

True enough, i did not realize that the performance gain was that much. I guess i just did not notice it in game that much so i figured it was negligible.

Should i mess with voltage at all or would that just damage the gpu?

 

Around halfway between 6770m/460m performance with an increase like that. (I believe the 460m is about 40% more powerful than the 6770m, correct me if I'm wrong)

Mind posting temps as well?

 

Sure, with stock clocks i peaked at 82C and overclocked with 850/900 she peaked at 87C, these temps were taken from gpu-z. Attached are the logs from the respected tests.

 

After I updated the bios, I changed to fixed graphics, but now in catalyst control centre I cannot change from high-performance to power-saving. When I click on power-saving, it doesn't let me apply the settings, it just clicks and does nothing.

 

You don't have to click apply. I should just flicker the screen and change for you.

edit: are you running the latest drivers?

 

Be sure to close all open programs before clicking, even browser and any open windows.

 

That shouldn't cause it not to change.

 

Hello,
I was able to get a stable overclock of 850/900 and it works great for tons of different games (COD, RedFaction A, Portal 2) but whenever I go to play Starcraft 2, it always crashes about 5 minutes into a match.

Why is the overclock stable on every game I have except for starcraft? If I reset the GPU to stock speeds, Starcraft doesnt crash anymore...

 

Someone else said their starcraft crashes in 10 minutes. It seems your OC is too high. I think it depends on how hard the GPU is pushed. On one OC setting, 3D mark/FSX ran fine, but Furmark would crash the drivers within about 45 seconds.

 

The strange thing is, the temps did not get too high at the point of crashing, and that overclock works great for every other game I own. Isn't that the same overclock you are running?

 

i think the crashing could also be contributed to the fact that fixed mode is new to the 61xx series and will be more stable when HP releases an official driver update

 

Different programs write different data patterns. If you overclock the memory, you risk data corruptions if the rising edge of the clock doesn't coincide with the data you want to store or read. Similar for the GPU clocks. As well, AMD uses different memory manufacturers (Hynix, Samsung etc..) for their graphics cards so the specs of your "1GB" may differ slightly from his (different CAS timings for example). They are tuned for the stock clock. Again, similar story for GPU (Different leakage current etc..)

 

That is true. It could honestly be a huge combo of things. Until HP releases an update or 11.8 is released by AMD, we are really running with a half fix.

 

I had the same issue. I simply uninstalled CCC and reinstalled the one of HP's website and it works fine now.

 

When you say half-fix, would that mean a full fix would fix the crashing and potentially allow for higher OCing? Or just fix the crashing?