~ATI Radeon 6970 Overclocking Mini Guide~

[belial8321]

Hey, just a mini guide to get a stable overclock on a radeon 6970 or unlock 6950 as its basically the same card

Ok so from catalyst control centre we need to go to the AMD Overdrive section, where you will see (if you havn't looked at an overclock yet) a little lock picture of a padlock, you click this and it may ask you to confirm you want to unlock it and you accept there t's and c's about overclocking risk's etc etc, just click yes, its almost impossible to damage your card with CCC.

Now you should have 4 sliders available - each with a considerable power to change your card-

High performance GPU clock settings - the ability to change to core clock of your GPU

High performance Memory clock settings - the ability to change the clock speed of your memory

Power Control settings - in my opinion the most effective slider, the amount of power your card can utilize can dramatically effect your benchmark fps (ie furmark) by up to 60fps, in my experience

Fan control - no performance increase, noise increase but also you need to access this or your card will hit 100c on a long bench and start to fry

To start overclocking from this point, choose one of the first two sliders gpu or memory clock, lets say we start with gpu clock - left click the slider and scroll your mouse wheel by 1 click - on my CCC this is a 15mhz increment, each click of the wheel, click apply, your screen might quickly flash - then run furmark or your normal benchmark at your normal settings and look for average fps improvements, also look for graphical defects, distorted pixels, bright colour blocks, clear blocking of picture in area's etc - You'll notice if your graphics go funny, if it goes too far the screen may go black as the driver attempts to recover, this is because the core gpu cannot keep up with clock speed you have requested from it and it loses sync, keep stepping up in these mousewheel turn increments until the picture starts to fail/lockup at your standard benchmark settings, then run it a few more times to check stability.

After this, drop that slider back down to default and repeat the process with the memory slider, looking for graphical abonormalities.

Doing the clock and memory seperately makes it easier to diagnose where a graphics crash/fault is coming from should one occur - this overclock can take a while, therefore PATIENCE is your ultimate virtue in being successful.

The voltage meter - the one slider which you can just whack up to max from my experience, it lets your overclocks really work hard but without the risk of a damaging voltage as its limited by CCC

From here you should test your overclock a few times on your favourite bench, furmark is most effective to see improvements in, you should notice at least 30fps improvement, also make sure your fan speed is set to manual control - i find 50% keeps the card around 60C on any bench, though the cooler it is, the longer your card will last, even though at 100% it does indeed sound like a hairdryer

Any questions guys, feel free to, also check out my phenom overclocking thread in the CPU section of this forum!

Jamie - XOUK

http://www.youtube.com/user/XtremeOverclockUK?feature=mhsn

My new youtube channel, what my overclocks have been able to render

 

[TNA]

Nice guide. Would be more interested in how to overclock using say Afterburner where you can increase volts and get it to say 1GHz core 6GHz Memory. Also 50% fan speed is kind of high, makes too much noise to be of interest to many people, if any

 

[belial8321]

Thanks for comment am planning to do an after burner section in this guide at some point - maybe later this week, and also the fan speed, im going by my own preference/opinion, my pc sounds like a hoover and always has im so used to it now im not bothered XD get some awesome temps with air cooling even though its loud, ie 19C ambient case, cpu 20C idle @4ghz 35C max at load
Oh and also i hate any temp in pc going over like 50C, i hate imagining my poor hardware cooking itself even though my gfx card for example is under no threat whatsoever from 50C temps, its just a wierd obsession XD

 

[MikeHiow]

I'd be surprised if there is a card that wouldn't be stable with simply all the CCC overclocking values set to max.

It's great you've taken the time to do the guide, but seeing as everyone can just stick everyone on full in CCC, I'm not sure of it's relevance. This is why people are using things like MSI AB and the like.

 

[drunkenmaster]

The only two things to point out are, CCC, general limits unless you have a card with silly limits(asus/msi sometimes) then I've yet to see a card that can't hit max limits.

Also Furmark is 100% worthless as a tool for ANYTHING. There isn't a game that comes close to Furmark loading, not the same ballpark. Whats stable for Furmark, or I should say, a speed thats unstable in Furmark might be stable in every game you'd ever play. You can often get higher, sometimes a LOT higher stable overclocks for every real world usage you'd ever put the gpu through, but it will fail completely in Furmark.

If your core can do 1000Mhz in Crysis, but craps out at 850Mhz in Furmark, but every single other game is also stable at 1000Mhz, which will you use?

Been saying it for two years, Furmark has been described as a power virus by both AMD and Nvidia, it doesn't bear any relation to real world stability in any other application.

THeres one thing Furmark can tell you, how fast you can run your gpu in furmark.

 

[belial8321]

Well i have had some older cards crash in CCC before, though thats maybe cause they are so old and well used

Thanks for the pointers guys, think i will rewrite this as an afterburner guide when i get time, and oo i didn't know that about furmark all i know is that it works your card hard as hell, the ultimate gpu/cpu test in my opinion is if you can run WoW on ultra and stand in a busy city at peak time and hold above 60fps

 

[MikeHiow]

I test mine with a few passes of Crysis benchmark at Enthusiast settings followed by a run of Heaven.

 

[dave101sport]

I'd be surprised if there is a card that wouldn't be stable with simply all the CCC overclocking values set to max.

It's great you've taken the time to do the guide, but seeing as everyone can just stick everyone on full in CCC, I'm not sure of it's relevance. This is why people are using things like MSI AB and the like.

i have an xfx hd 6970 and the only stable OC is 905/ 1410 so there are some out there.