help OCing 6990m

whats the best method to OC a 6990m?
and for people who have OC'd, what are your clockrates and are there any heat/stability problems?

i'm new to OCing as a whole so if there are other things to keep in mind please let me know

 

Prob should checkout my thread 560M Yiddo gives suggestions there.

 

A few things you should know before you start Overclocking anything are:
-It may void your warranty.
-You might fry or damage your card
-Stable/maximum speeds vary between cards
-Overclocking causes the card to draw more power, thus more heat.

After you accept all this then let the fun begin. There are tons of threads on overclocking in general and a couple about this card in particular. Just use the search.

 

I found my 6990M suprisingly easy to overclock and after finding the highest overclock I just flashed the Vbios with ease and from someone who has Flash phobia as its only my 4th flash since bricking a laptop Clevo/Sager wins again on that one, but it is best to use software and set it to start using windows task manager if you are not confident with flashing its a much safer way of overclocking.

Firstly yes as above you will/may void your warranty but then again your a gamer and 99% of gamers overclock and I have pushed every piece of hardware I have had to the limit and it has never died on me and coming from the 8700M SLI which was made with metal from an old fridge I dont think you need worry, but that is not to say you should not worry

You need to use a program like Trixx which is what I find the best to be able to overclock as CCC will not go above 740/1000 at the moment with this card and that is far too low to what the 6990M can handle IMO. You want to start by running Furmark at stock and run it in to a full burn in for 10 minutes keeping a close eye on the temps across the board using HWINFO. If any get near the 100oC kill the test straight away.

(I had a bad stock paste job to begin with and it jumped to 115oC within seconds on the MEM(iO) scared the crap out of me I applied ICD and hey presto all was sorted).

Once you know your maximum temps then you can decide if your current compound application can handle the overclocks if you are hitting above 90oC already its not recommended IMO.

If you will not void your warranty and are on stock compound you can consider repasting properly with a TIM or the like yourself to get your temps spot on but that is your choice.

Once done move onto raising the Core up by small amounts 5-10mhz to begin with until you reach 800mhz stable by stress testing with Furmark and then drop it down to 1-5mhz and creep up. Once you hit a lockup/crash on the core that is your current maximum, so restart the system and then drop it down 5-10mhz and retest to make sure it is stable. Do the same with the memory once you hit 1000mhz drop it down to 1-5mhz and find your highest overclock and retest you may notice the memory will artifact causing abnormal activity on screen with random colours appearing as blocks that get worse the highest the overclock or the heat being produced to the point it will lockup. When you think you have you have your stable clocks run some benchmarks.

Keep a close eye on the temps the entire time and put some alarms in place if you need to this can be done using Throttlestop or the like.

I can have mine run upto around 860/1145 but it does not stay completely stable and the overclocks are very very high for the 6990M way above what the voltage and cooling can handle so be careful. Consider a jump of 100mhz running at 800/1000 to begin with as that is more than enough for any game at the moment, considering how powerful the card is stock is more than enough.

 

Why did you flash the vbios? what does that do?

 

Sorry I should have been clearer I meant I flashed the Vbios so that my performance clocks did not require software to run at what I set them too, I just replaced the stock clocks 715/900 with my new clocks 850/1125.

Not recommended unless you are 110% sure:

A: You know exactly what your doing
B: You are confident the clocks are completely stable

I spent a good week of testing before I was happy to flash them so far so good.

Stick with software overclocking however.

 

thanks for the reply but something bad happened while i was using ATI Tray Tools and now I cant boot normally without getting artifacts, and eventually BSOD

heres the own thread with details
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...up-cant-change-settings-without-crashing.html

i literally did not touch anything else. I still cant boot normally without eventually BSODing and am writing in safemode.

Isnt ATI Tray Tools software overclock? it shouldnt brick the card? and like i said in the thread it wasnt like i set in crazy clockrates I put around 300-400

 

Software overclock just means you set the overclock after you bootup right? is there no way to start it on startup?

 

Oh no horrible ATI Tray Tools

Dont panic you have probably just set the clocks to something it is not happy with as you are overiding what the Vbios sets the clocks to and it may have changed the 2D clocks for instance.

Go in under safemode and uninstall ATI Tray Tools and restart and see if thats sorts it out for you it could be running at startup. Otherwise you may need uninstall your CCC drivers and uninstall the display driver in Device Manager and then run Driver Sweeper and crap clean the ATI files.

Restart and it should install a Standard VGA adaptor and then install the latest CCC package from scratch and you should be back to normal.

After that make sure you have stable temps as mentioned above and go for Trixx or MSI not ATI Tools.

By that I mean stick to using a facility like Trixx or MSI Afterburner so that no permanent changes are made to the GPU clocks so that if the worst happens you can reset them, unlike flashing the Vbios in which if something goes wrong you have to reflash.

 

thanks again for sticking with me but how is the bolded part done exactly? i get the gist of it but want to be sure. after seeing flashy artifacts on my screen i got kinda spooked and want to be careful about things i do to this baby from now on

 

Artifacts are caused when the clocks are set to something the voltage cannot handle similiar to what you will see when overclocking as mentioned ATI tray tools allows you to switch between the .90V and 1.10V which the 6990M allows if you change it then your 2D clocks will have a paddy because they are suppose to be running at .90V. You cannot change the voltage on these cards that is something I have found out not without some extra work.

Go in under safe mode.
Start - Control Panel - Uninstall a program - Catalyst Control Center
Right click my computer and select properties - Device Manager - Find the 6990M under display adaptors right click and uninstall and tick the box for software too.
Restart.
When you do it should then load up with a poor resolution and it should install a Standard VGA adaptor. Download and install the latest CCC package and you should be sorted.

 

just uninstall your display drivers normally. then look up and install a program called driver sweeper. restart your computer and boot into safe mode (if you don't know how just spam f8 after your computer starts and it'll give you a safe mode option in the boot options). Once you're in safe mode then run driver sweeper and select amd display driver and let it do its stuff. You should do this before updating your drivers to keep driver problems away. Then install the latest catalyst (i believe 11.11c) and restart your computer again and you're done.

 

thanks guys, put both of you guys' advice to practice and now its back up to full speed

I couldnt uninstall the catalyst driver from safemode though, as it disables windows installer. i went into device manager, removed display driver, rebooted to normal mode (which was now in low-res mode) and had to use the ATI proprietary utility to uninstall catalyst, not in control panel. then ran driver sweeper. reinstalled display drivers using the Clevo driver disk, then updated ATI to latest.

+reps to both of ya

 

one last question yiddo, if i understood your earlier posts correctly your 'in-load' clocks are now permanently set to 850/1125?
was this your maximum OC?
how long have you had it set this way for? do you game often? how is the stability/temps compared to stock clocks?

 

My overclock is high in fact from what i have seen from others who have the 6990M on stock cooling at least so dont expect to reach what I can trial and error to find your highest overclock and then use furmark and benchmark and games to confirm its stability. I can push it to around 860/1145 but that is not entirely stable so I have used 850/1125 as my flashed clocks because I know they run perfectly and my max temp is 86oC even with high ambient temps.

Stick with using Trixx for your overclocking as mentioned in previous posts flashing is quite advanced and if things go wrong you cannot go into safe mode to fix it like you just did you must reflash or worst if it bricks.

 

alright. yeah i gotcha ill stick to software overclock. just wanted a reference point for the clockspeeds