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Just changed crossfire 6970's for single 7970! Mad you may think?

ferr250

ferr250

ferr250

Associate
Joined
22 Jan 2011
Posts
49
Location
Birmingham
This may be of interest to anybody thinking of swapping from a crossfire setup back to a single card. I've done this for 2 reasons, firstly i ditched my eyefinity set up and replaced it with one of Dell's superb 27" screens, (thanks overclockers) and secondly i planned to watercool the 7970 to reduce the noise from the 2 stock coolers on the 6970's. So last week i ordered a Sapphire 7970 and an EK waterblock. The block is superb, very good quality and easy to fit. I did'nt try the 7970 with the stock cooler so i can't really comment on it's abilities as standard, but with the EK block fitted i've had some surprising results. I ran a few benchmarks before removing the 6970's ( these have been superb, i've had no issues with any games i've run), 3D mark 11 performance, scored 10044 and Heaven scored 1362. This was with the following settings:
2560/1440
High
High
Trilinear
4x
Enabled
Enabled
Enabled
Disabled
Normal
Heaven score was let down i think by the min. FPS which was 16. With the new card fitted and supplied drivers i ran 3D mark and scored 7584! Oh ****. I then started overclocking using sapphires tool Trixx, and recorded at each stage what the 3d mark score was:
925/1325 7584
1000/1400 8040 @1.2v
1050/1450 8362 @1.2v
1100/1500 8681 @1.2v
1150/1500 8951 @1.2v
1200/1500 9204 @1.2v
1200/1550 9255 @1.2v
1200/1600 9311 @1.2v
1225/1600 9432 @1.2v
1250/1600 9557 @1.2v
1250/1650 9603 @1.2v

At this point i had to raise the GPU voltage to 1.3, and reduce the memory to 1625 which appears to be the max for the memory at standard voltage.

1280/1625 9753 @1.3v
1300/1625 9847 @1.3v
1320/1625 9934 @1.3v
1335/1625 10007 @ 1.3v
At 1335 artefacting was just begining. I then updated the driver to 8.921.2.0 as a few people were talking of good improvements. I then ran the following:

1225/1625 10047 @1.2v
1335/1625 10608 @1.3v

Heaven scores 2068 (82.1 fps, 33.8 min, 164.5 max)
At 1335/1625 the card isn't stable in game, but anything up to this is fine. I've gamed for over 8 hours now with no problems and the maximum gpu temp i've seen is 48c in a warm room. Luckily i ended up with a 'good' card, but i now have a single card performing slightly better than my 6970 xfire, leaving the option to crossfire this in the future. Hope it helps anybody thinking of doing the same. By the way my processor is a 2600k @5ghz (24/7;)
 
That was my initial plan but i do ultimately want xfire 7970, 2 blocks plus a few bits would have cost £130, 7970 + block cost £544, i've just sold the 6970's for £430 on a well known auction site.
 
I still love the 6970's just felt the need for a 7970, plus i've been reading about the overclocks people were getting. Something satisfying about that extra 'free' performance!
 
I would highly recommend tha 8.921.2.0 driver to anybody installing a 7970 at the moment. Great ingame performance.
 
The Heaven benchmark was most surprising, a big jump and much higher minimum fps. Possibly due to 3gb memory instead of crossfires 2gb.
 
Very very sweet, the clocks on the core ont his thing are insane... truely mental... how long they last at this speed is anyones guess though rofl. Looks like you made the right choice, I reckon 2x7970's are around 3x6970's although hard to judge if you'll be able to clock both that high, I'd be surprised. Thanks for the detailed runs, makes for good reading actually!

I assume your 2600 is watercolled getting 5ghz? I'm about to upgrade my rig (keeping GPU's), and was gonna go i5?
 
Yes the cpu is watercooled, nothing special, one 240 rad. Takes 1.47v to get there but has run like this for over a year now with no probs.
 
I've seen plenty of people with I5's @ 5ghz, so go for it. I upgraded from a Q6600, great chip, i could get it to 3.8ghz on a nice board but had to buy a Q9650 to get past 4ghz, £240 for 400mhz! what a plonker
 
Got to be worth considering then? The 6970's only really got noisy when the fans ramped up during gaming. Used to drive the missus potty hehe!
 
It's not just noise, it's just the fact I'd rather a single card. Saying that I think I can wait till the new nVidia cards come out and then decide.
 
The good thing about having crossfire is if one card dies you always have a spare one to use until the rma comes through. :D (that is unless you have spare gpu's laying around of decent quality)
 
Nice results there my 7970 should be here tomorrow then iam going to order a waterblock hoping to get 1300 on the core.

How did you dicide the max volts you are willing to put through it ?
 
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