Upgrade from Radeon 5850 - £200-240 budget

[Mr Krugga]

Stock voltages...im impressed, most people recommend bumping it up to +20% to insure it gets enough power to run at 6970 clocks...but then again in standard use the card is unlikely to draw enough power to require the increase...but its nice to know its there!
You should be able to really push it once you have increased the voltage a little,what you using to overclock it? Afterburner?

Yup, using MSI Afterburner Beta 3.

Also on the latest Catalyst 11.5a drivers with CAP2.

The card runs pretty good at this resolution although I do think it lacks some power but I wish to unleash it soon enough

Got my new fans from OcUK today so gonna install them now and see if I can drop the temps a little, then set a custom fan profile and start overclocking the nutz of the card.

Having 3 voltages to play with may be a little confusing but one is memory specific and another core specific with only AUX voltage being responsible for overall overclock.

I love the custom BIOS that MSI made for this card, unlocking the card helps a lot with overclocking.

BTW, the card's default voltage in idle is 0.899v and 1.149v under load. Make sure you enable Low Leakage under Graphics Processor Type in Afterburner as it's the only way to read the voltages properly!

Also overclock the memory first, it has auto-throttling disabled and you should record score in a benchmark whilst running it constantly at different memory settings to find the sweetspot. I'm not sure what the safe voltages for memory are but with a little bump, you should be able to push it way past 1400MHz. I never go in smaller than 25MHz increments for the memory as it doesn't give you a lot of performance boost in many games.

 

[logi-cat]

get a 2gb 6950 and flash it to a 6970

 

[Mr Krugga]

get a 2gb 6950 and flash it to a 6970

Care to read before you post?


The card is unstable with my previous overclocks, gonna try bumping up the power slider to +20% and see if that resolves any issues.

Testing in Heaven 2.5, the card doesn't get much above 60c.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Out of the Antec Tri-Cool fans you got, how were colour LED, transparent with no LED or plain black?

Thinking of getting one for a friend, but according to the feedback what people get seems to be random.

 

[Mr Krugga]

Out of the Antec Tri-Cool fans you got, how were colour LED, transparent with no LED or plain black?

Thinking of getting one for a friend, but according to the feedback what people get seems to be random.

Let me have a look, I haven't actually installed any yet