Show Us Your Rig [3]

[AC]

Hey 714 !! You said in a earlier thread that you were willing to help a self taught scrub like me if I needed it. Is that true \ for real ?? I do have some questions for you if it is !! My new rig, (page 134 of "show us your rig" ) is slow on the 3d mark and novabench test. I wanna overclock but I'm CLUELESS !! Got any tips or advice ?? And -- you'll have to dumb it down for me --- HARD !!

Now, this really isn't my level of expertise. I can try to look at some things, but I'm not the best person to ask in this

 

[Tomha]

Unfortunately I am not familiar with the exacts on overclocking on Nvidia cards, but what I have picked up is that generally, you dont need to worry about your card spontaneously combusting or anything. Watch your temperatures, the more volts you apply, the hotter it will get, keep it in reasonable range (rule of thumb is below 80 degrees Celsius), and you will be find to play with speeds as much as you like.

Increase your speeds by 25 or 50 mhz at a time, test stability with something like 3Dmark or Heaven:
3Dmark Site: Futuremark - world's most popular benchmarks and PC performance tests
Heaven Site: Heaven DX11 Benchmark | Unigine: real-time 3D engine (game, simulation, visualization and VR)
If you get artifacts, i.e. colourful lines, flickers, dots, etc, button back.
If the overclock crashes, button back. You can recognize this several ways, the whole OS may crash, your screen may go black, your video drivers may stop responding, all signs the overclock is unstable. Generally you aim for the highest possible stable overclock.

On the topic of highest possible stable overclock, I applied more volts in a more direct way to my card via MSI afterburner (I believe this can be used with nVidia cards Fsufan0025), and I have it running stable at 1100mhz core, 1575mhz mem, peaking around 64 degrees Celsius, and I am gonna try push 1200mhz now .

 

[fsufan0025]

OK that's cool !! ANYBODY ??? I have no clue where to start. In thr BIOS, there's nothing to adjust, that I can see !! What am I missing ??

 

[AC]

OK that's cool !! ANYBODY ??? I have no clue where to start. In thr BIOS, there's nothing to adjust, that I can see !! What am I missing ??

In my BIOS, I have an option to change video memory or something like that, can you look for that?

 

[Tomha]

You use software, not BIOS for graphics cards. I don't know if Nvidia has any native support or anything, try MSI afterburner?
http://download1.msi.com/files/downloads/uti_exe/vga/MSIAfterburnerSetup221.zip

That's all I can offer for Nvidia cards though.

 

[ganjiry]

Ganjiry - That is awesome! Personally a bit over the top, but you gotta admire the hard work and it payd off!

yeah its not to my taste but the work that went into it and the quality of work is just great enit.
he did another water cooled rig that he engineered most of the parts too which u would probably like more but i cant find it. sorry

 

[ZaLiTH]

To be clear, a graphics card has it's own BIOS. Software such as EVGA Precision will allow you to overclock your graphics card from a software level, and has the option to apply whatever settings you choose each start up.

Once you find a decent overclock that runs stable and doesn't cause heat issues, you can edit the GPU BIOS and enter those speeds/voltages as it's defaults if you feel the need. This would keep that overclock even if moved to a new PC.

I'd recommend you get EVGA Precision to test different levels of overclocking, and ATI Tool to test for graphic glitches while you play with settings. Once you've got a decent OC, then you can start looking at more permanent measures if you really want to.

 

[Alsisgevat]

I was just about to say Evga precision tool, but ZaLiTH beat me to it, anyway I have that tool and it is a very strait forward tool and guides you well along the ways over overclocking, basically just watch the temps and never increse to much at one time,keep the numbers low and close to each other, and remember that the idle temps may not differ too much while your oc'ing,but your full run temps will be allot different,so check that while your tuning.

 

[ZaLiTH]

...and remember that the idle temps may not differ too much while your oc'ing,but your full run temps will be allot different,so check that while your tuning.

Fortunately, that's where ATI Tool comes in handy. You can have it render a 3D model and work your GPU to detect any artifacts (glitches) in the model and test for stability.

 

[Alsisgevat]

Nerd:haha: haha,just joking.

 

[Tomha]

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.

 

[ZaLiTH]

Nerd:haha: haha,just joking.

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.

 

[fsufan0025]

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 !!

 

[Alsisgevat]

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

 

[Tomha]

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 . 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.

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 . I'll get into this once I get my replacement h100 back.

 

[Alsisgevat]

On an h100 you can have allot of fun oc-ing a cpu.So enjoy,but whatch those temps carefully!

 

[ZaLiTH]

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...

 

[Tomha]

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

 

[Andreas W]

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

 

[Tomha]

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.