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Disappointing Benchmark, Tips on increasing FPS?

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21 Jul 2011
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So I used Heaven and ran a benchmark test and pretty much bombed out on FPS. It's really disappointing. All I am aiming for is an average FPS of 40 but I seem to fall way short.

I'm running a Gainward GTX 580 Phantom 3gb on a Sabertooth 990fx with 8gig ram and a 1100T x6 processor.


benchmarka.png




I'm not into majorily overclocking but I'm willing to give something a shot if it will increase my average FPS. So far I have used the bios to auto OC the processor to 3.8ghz and I've increased the graphics cards core clock to 850mhz


Any tips?
 
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Caporegime
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What are your temps whilst gaming/benching/idle? What cooling is your CPU on? I have no clue to CPU overclocking and if you want to overclock that, I suggest you pop in the overclocking and cooling thread for your CPU.

As for your GPU, depending on how your temps and voltages are looking, this will decide how much further you can go. The most important part is the chip lottery of course but we should be able to squeeze a little more out of your GPU.

Download afterburner 2.3.0 and install and run that and let us know what is showing (pic would be better) :)
 
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Right the first Benchmark was used running Dual monitors on Heaven. The Afterburner image was just my settings without anything running.

The image below is me running a benchmark again but with a single monitor and the afterburner image alongside it shows all the temps.


http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/8246/bench2.png

If the image is larger than 1280 pixels wide then please resize, link only or put in spoiler tags. Thank you.
 
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Some people in the thread you linked are getting crazy scores. I know they are using different cards and processors. But surely there must be an option for me to boost myself to some more impressive scores.

I have considered getting a second GTX and going SLI. But I was worried that the CPU would just nullify any improvements
 
Caporegime
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This looks a great guide to overclocking a 580.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20110215/evga-geforce-gtx-580-superclocked-gpu-overclocking-session/

Personaly, I like using afterburner for my overclocking and find it simple to do.

1. Click settings on Afterburner and tick "Unlock voltage control"
2. The max voltage you should be looking at is 1.2V but for now, I would only goto 1.175V.
3. Push the slider for the core clock to 900. Run Heaven again and if is crashes, drop the core clock to 890 and rerun Heaven.
4. If it passes Heaven, add 10Mhz to the 900 (910) and rerun the Heaven test. Again if it fails, go back to the last time it passed.
5. When your core clock is at the max OC, start on the memory. Slide that up in 50 and work from there. A slow process but worth it if you want to overclock your GPU.
6 When you have found your max over clock, drop each of the core and mem by 10Mhz and save this to a profile.
7. Go play some games and if you see artifacting, your memory is still too high and if it crashes to desktop, your core clock is too high.

Hopefully this will help but make sure you have temp monitoring on all the time. Heat is an overclockers nightmare.
 
Soldato
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Some people in the thread you linked are getting crazy scores. I know they are using different cards and processors. But surely there must be an option for me to boost myself to some more impressive scores.
Overclocking would be the only way to improve the GTX580 performance, but as people have already pointed out you can't really expect the GTX580 to performance far better than what it is, which is a GTX580.

CPU ain't a limitation in Heaven Bench, as the bench is design to stress the graphic cards to the max pretty much regardless of your CPU performance. In real-world gaming though, I am certain that there are quite a lot of games which the Phenom II X6 would bottleneck if you actually went down the SLI GTX580 path.
 
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agreed funny how the mention of 2 monitors was excluded in the first post !

Sorry this wasn't intentional I just have always ran 2 monitors and didn't really think about the impact on the Gfx card.

This looks a great guide to overclocking a 580.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20110215/evga-geforce-gtx-580-superclocked-gpu-overclocking-session/

Personaly, I like using afterburner for my overclocking and find it simple to do.

1. Click settings on Afterburner and tick "Unlock voltage control"
2. The max voltage you should be looking at is 1.2V but for now, I would only goto 1.175V.
3. Push the slider for the core clock to 900. Run Heaven again and if is crashes, drop the core clock to 890 and rerun Heaven.
4. If it passes Heaven, add 10Mhz to the 900 (910) and rerun the Heaven test. Again if it fails, go back to the last time it passed.
5. When your core clock is at the max OC, start on the memory. Slide that up in 50 and work from there. A slow process but worth it if you want to overclock your GPU.
6 When you have found your max over clock, drop each of the core and mem by 10Mhz and save this to a profile.
7. Go play some games and if you see artifacting, your memory is still too high and if it crashes to desktop, your core clock is too high.

Hopefully this will help but make sure you have temp monitoring on all the time. Heat is an overclockers nightmare.

Thank you I will read that guide and do some basic overclocking.

Overclocking would be the only way to improve the GTX580 performance, but as people have already pointed out you can't really expect the GTX580 to performance far better than what it is, which is a GTX580.

CPU ain't a limitation in Heaven Bench, as the bench is design to stress the graphic cards to the max pretty much regardless of your CPU performance. In real-world gaming though, I am certain that there are quite a lot of games which the Phenom II X6 would bottleneck if you actually went down the SLI GTX580 path.


Hmmm I've got a bit of money to spend and I want to improve my fps but I'm now quite confused as to what to do. It seems that I could SLI my Gfx card or buy a brand new one. But no matter which of the two I do i'll almost certainly have to switch to an i5 processor and new mobo.
 
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