Show Us Your Rig [3]

Right, well I played around some more, my issue was voltage. I applied 1250mV and that seemed to remove that brick wall of mine sitting at 1040mhz core clock.

I almost got 1250mhz core 1600mhz mem working, it kept stable for several tests, but after a few it got to the stage where every test caused the drivers to crash and they continued to crash every time it had to render something other than the mouse, until I restarted.

After this I buttoned back to 1200mhz core, 1600mhz mem. So far everything is running stable with some very nice results, I am up 382 points in 3Dmark 11's extreme setting, from 2544 to 3162. My only issue is heat, idle around 30C, load reaches about 66C, this causes the fans to kick in to 51% and they enter the audible range. For such an overclock its not a bad trade off, but I may put it back further to 1100mhz core, see if I cant keep it a little quieter.

Alsisgevat said:

Nerd haha,just joking.

Tomha said:

Right, well I played around some more, my issue was voltage. I applied 1250mV and that seemed to remove that brick wall of mine sitting at 1040mhz core clock.

I almost got 1250mhz core 1600mhz mem working, it kept stable for several tests, but after a few it got to the stage where every test caused the drivers to crash and they continued to crash every time it had to render something other than the mouse, until I restarted.

After this I buttoned back to 1200mhz core, 1600mhz mem. So far everything is running stable with some very nice results, I am up 382 points in 3Dmark 11's extreme setting, from 2544 to 3162. My only issue is heat, idle around 30C, load reaches about 66C, this causes the fans to kick in to 51% and they enter the audible range. For such an overclock its not a bad trade off, but I may put it back further to 1100mhz core, see if I cant keep it a little quieter.

I don't have any experience with ATI cards, I've stuck to the green side of the fence for my setups... But 66C doesn't sound like anything to be worried about. I would probably only start worrying if it gets close to 80C or 90C. Maybe someone with some experience OC'ing ATIs could be of more help though.

Otherwise, you could probably find tons of helpful info on your card on the Overclock.net forums... Obviously though, we'd want to hear all about it afterwards.

So -- my video card is the only thing I can overclock ?? No ram or cpu ?? Dang !! I have Asus Turbo Key that I use, but I don't see much difference when using it !!

ZaLiTH said:

I don't have any experience with ATI cards, I've stuck to the green side of the fence for my setups... But 66C doesn't sound like anything to be worried about. I would probably only start worrying if it gets close to 80C or 90C. Maybe someone with some experience OC'ing ATIs could be of more help though.

Otherwise, you could probably find tons of helpful info on your card on the Overclock.net forums... Obviously though, we'd want to hear all about it afterwards.

I will admit, I was an avid Nvidia fanboy once upon a time, in my mind it was the one and only option, I was gonna get an x80 and that was that. By the time I had my money together though, the situation changed a little. I eagerly awaited Nvidia's new cards, now too close for me to want a 580, however with speculation of them being as far off as september 2012 on some sites, I grew impatient. Then AMD released their 7xxx series and my money called to me, it begged to be let out :P. I went for it and got my 7950, it was a month or two before the 680 came out, but it would have been out of my price range anyway.

I've been impressed with its performance, I am a little gutted its now like $100 cheaper, but hey, for 2 months I had one of the most powerful graphics cards on the planet, a great step up from my geforce 210 nearing its 1st anniversary (yeah I only entered the custom computer circle about 15 months ago).


Back to nowadays, I did several more consecutive tests, at the end I did a 15 minute burn in test with furmark on extreme settings, it held at 69C for about 12 minutes before it tipped to 70 just at the end. It was my bad stating my issue was heat, its the sound the heat can produce due to fans, but I can live with that. I think I will stop here for now, should the urge present itself I may tweak voltages a little more, try reach 1300mhz core.

The 7950/7970 owners lounge on Overclock.net was actually where it was suggested I use MSI afterburner to increase the voltage to solve my issue with being unable to pass 1040mhz core clock in AMD overdrive. Great site though, it has solved many of my hardware related issues, I strongly recommend it.

Alsisgevat said:

No,you can overclock your cpu and ram,but this is best done in the bios. Or some MSI programs or even some motherboards give you overclocking tools,and this can be used to oc the cpu or ram, and oc-ing the cpu is allot more fun

Well then I look forward to this, cause OCing my gpu has been pretty fun. I don't look forward to the 10 hour stress tests at every point though :P. I'll get into this once I get my replacement h100 back.

Tomha said:

I will admit, I was an avid Nvidia fanboy once upon a time, in my mind it was the one and only option...

I definitely wouldn't say it's the only option, I've got no problem with ATI. Actually, most of my friends would pick ATI over NVidia... I just always seem to end up with a green card and I've never been disappointed.

Well, not very often anyway... Those two G80 320MB/320-bit 8800GTS cards I tried to SLI about a year or so back were, well, calling that venture 'disappointing' would kinda cover the tip of the iceberg, at least until the heat melts it...

ZaLiTH said:

I definitely wouldn't say it's the only option, I've got no problem with ATI.

Oh absolutely, I was just using that to demonstrate how much of a fanboy I was :P

Qustion while people are talking about gpu O.C, erm is something wrong with my card or is it MSI Afterburner & EVGA Precision, I set my core clock to 1100 on my GTX 560 but both tools still says that the core clock is at default 925, but GPU-Z and CPU-Z Both reports that that card is running at 1100, any one knows what could be wrong? EVGA does respond if I set the core clock to 1000 it changes then, but if I move it higher then that it wont change anything on the information

Once again, I am no Nvidia expert, but it sounds like its a software issue, not hardware. Ati cards have a low idle speed, for example I have clocked it at 1200mhz, but when not in use it clocks at 300mhz. Do Nvidia cards do this? That could be the issue, I know with my CPU some programs read the idle speed of 1.6ghz as opposed to the load speed.