Overclocking my 290x!

[Avenged7Fold]

I have finally gotten round to clocking my Sapphire 290x, which i put underwater a few weeks back.

Previously i owned a Liquid cooled pny gtx 580, of which i never overclocked. This is simply because i never felt the need to and when i bought this card, the 6xx were out, so i found benching a bit pointless. Now i have a nice and cool 290x, i want to start pushing these clocks but am unfamiliar with a few things due to being out of loop for a while and having little GPU clocking experience.

At the moment i have a 360 + 240mm radiator cooling my CPU and GPU. So heat and noise isn't really a concern.

Just started my clocking but i see MSI afterburner doesn't let me add more than 100mv. This seems quite low for the absolute upper limit for overclocking software, but then again, i haven't clocked a 290x before, so correct me if i am wrong.

Another concern is 'Aux voltage', i just dont know what it is. I don't really feel comfortable overclocking with a voltage slider in front of me, of which i have no idea what voltage this controls. Can someone shed some light on this?

I have been told that GPU tweak has a higher upper limit for voltage but i need an Asus bios to do this. I have been wary of flashing GPU bios', due to a bad bios flash i had when unlocking my old 6950. What are the risks involved when flashing these cards, considering there is a dual bios switch? (I cant see mine but i am sure its there, unless Sapphire doesn't have a dual bios?).

Finally, what are the sort of clocks you guys are getting?

I will be searching through the other threads for the answers to many of these questions, but i cant find anything on Aux voltage.

 

[uksoldierboy]

I have finally gotten round to clocking my Sapphire 290x, which i put underwater a few weeks back.

Previously i owned a Liquid cooled pny gtx 580, of which i never overclocked. This is simply because i never felt the need to and when i bought this card, the 6xx were out, so i found benching a bit pointless. Now i have a nice and cool 290x, i want to start pushing these clocks but am unfamiliar with a few things due to being out of loop for a while and having little GPU clocking experience.

At the moment i have a 360 + 240mm radiator cooling my CPU and GPU. So heat and noise isn't really a concern.

Just started my clocking but i see MSI afterburner doesn't let me add more than 100mv. This seems quite low for the absolute upper limit for overclocking software, but then again, i haven't clocked a 290x before, so correct me if i am wrong.

Another concern is 'Aux voltage', i just dont know what it is. I don't really feel comfortable overclocking with a voltage slider in front of me, of which i have no idea what voltage this controls. Can someone shed some light on this?

I have been told that GPU tweak has a higher upper limit for voltage but i need an Asus bios to do this. I have been wary of flashing GPU bios', due to a bad bios flash i had when unlocking my old 6950. What are the risks involved when flashing these cards, considering there is a dual bios switch? (I cant see mine but i am sure its there, unless Sapphire doesn't have a dual bios?).

Finally, what are the sort of clocks you guys are getting?

I will be searching through the other threads for the answers to many of these questions, but i cant find anything on Aux voltage.

Hiya Avenged,

I'm using an Asus 290X so will try my best to help.

To begin with i use Afterburner for my 24/7 OC, (1150/1450, Fan speed @55% and max temps i see are 85c, the same or perhaps more seeing as your underwater should hopefully be doable by you.

For benchmarking i use both Afterburner and Gpu Tweak, i find that i can set my memory overclock in Afterburner much higher than i can using Gpu Tweak, but i also put the AUX voltage in Afterburner to max when doing so as it seems to help with the black screen issue when overclocking the memory.

For the Core i use Gpu Tweak, max clocks i've got so far are 1240/1625 for benching.


In regards to flashing the bios, i wouldn't worry to much about it if at all, if it does go wrong, just flip he switch and flash back the original.

 

[Avenged7Fold]

Thanks for the quick response. At the moment i am sitting on 1175/1500 and running valley. Temps are less than 50 degrees, so i have loads of headroom.

What is Aux voltage? I know you set it to max and it helps with your mem clock but is it a voltage tweaker for your memory or something else?

What are you using to see if artifacts pop up after your clocks?

ATM it is paired with my golden chip 8150. My two other rigs have average clocking 8320 and an 8350, both of which has reached 5 GHz stable. The reason i am running the 8150 is mainly to check bottlenecks at different clocks. This will be done after my GPU overclock.

The 8150 may have been badmouthed and the fixes on PD over BD are significant and quite noticeable but this 8150 is such a golden chip that i can pretty much tell it to run any clock 4.8GHz and under with just stock voltage, which makes constantly changing clocks for benching much easier. Even have screens of it heavily undervolted due to the voltage drop on my newb test board but still with a clock of 4.8-ish.

 

[uksoldierboy]

Thanks for the quick response. At the moment i am sitting on 1175/1500 and running valley. Temps are less than 50 degrees, so i have loads of headroom.

What is Aux voltage? I know you set it to max and it helps with your mem clock but is it a voltage tweaker for your memory or something else?

What are you using to see if artifacts pop up after your clocks?

ATM it is paired with my golden chip 8150. My two other rigs have average clocking 8320 and an 8350, both of which has reached 5 GHz stable. The reason i am running the 8150 is mainly to check bottlenecks at different clocks. This will be done after my GPU overclock.

The 8150 may have been badmouthed and the fixes on PD over BD are significant and quite noticeable but this 8150 is such a golden chip that i can pretty much tell it to run any clock 4.8GHz and under with just stock voltage, which makes constantly changing clocks for benching much easier. Even have screens of it heavily undervolted due to the voltage drop on my newb test board but still with a clock of 4.8-ish.

That's a good overclock pal and nice temps, i'm still using the reference cooler but hope to be underwater asap.

In regards to AUX voltage i really don't know, i just had a fiddle with it and it seems to have sorted out my black screen issues when overclocking the memory, would be good to know what it actually does though.

I just run games/benchmarks to check for artifacts bud, stuff like Crysis 3, BF4 or if benchmarking, 3DMARK Firestrike or Heaven valley.

 

[Avenged7Fold]

It is going swimmingly well at the moment. 1250/1500 and still on MSI afterburner (went ahead and went max on the 100mv, thought i might as well considering the cooling).

Still quite interested in hearing more on flashing the 290x. On another forum i saw that people were saying Sapphire cards fail flash more often. Though i am skeptical of the post (I have absolutely no idea why Sapphires would take to a new bios less, so likely not true), i am incredibly paranoid about messing it up. The poster went on to say that when he switched bios, he couldn't boot it up and the card had to be sent back.

Though i am thinking the guy was probably a troll, i am getting second thoughts on the Asus flash. I am welcoming all 290x flashers to tell me their experience but i am more interested in those who unsuccessfully flashed.

Current clock: 1250/1500
+100mv
VRM 1: 50C
VRM 2: 38C
GPU core: 48C

 

[jinxpad]

Hey Avenged,

1250 is a very good overclock, I'm using the same card but with the Asus Bios and GPU Tweak, I can't get above 1200 without getting artefacts at the moment, and I can't get above 1160 (so far) in Battlefield 4 without black screen crashes, although benchmarks and every other game I play runs fine @ 1200, so this could just be down to BF4 being as buggy as hell (as we've seen people getting black screen crashes in BF4 @ stock).

My temps don't surpass 51oC. Flashing the bios is easy, just follow the instructions to the letter and you'll be fine. Although I'm thinking of going back to my Sapphire BIOS because I still think GPU Tweak is causing some of my stability issues. More testing needed me thinks

I wasn't sure about 100mV on the AUX, I tried 50mV. Would love to hear some other people's thoughts on it though, is it safe to max out if the card is WC'd?

 

[Avenged7Fold]

Oh the Aux i left alone. The +100mv was on the core voltage.

After running valley a while, i noticed the odd artifact once in a blue moon so now have dialed it back to 1233/1500 until i have Asus bios to let me have some more volts! This clock is running fine in COD ghosts, haven't tried any other game yet.

I might just leave it there for now until BF4 gets updated and mantle is introduce to its benchmark to compare results. So unless i get really bored this week, will probably not flash for another few weeks.