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5870 X-Fire : Overclocking Help

kevy1986

kevy1986

kevy1986

Associate
Joined
20 Feb 2009
Posts
748
Location
Perthshire
Hey Guys,

I've asked about this in the past and ended up not bothering however i've just finished my HNC in programing and have quite a lot of time to myself for the next two months until I start next year and decided i'd give it a go and see what happens.

Currently my system is........

Q6600 @3.4Ghz ( Air Cooled )
8 Gig OCZ Gold 800Mhz Stock
Asus P5Q Pro
Samsung F1 Terabyte HD
2x HD5870 ( Reference cards, 1x Gigabyte & 1x Saphire )
Antec Tru Power 750W PSU
Housed : Antec 902 case

Ideally I would like to hit 1000Mhz core on each GPU. This would be done on purely stock coolers. I have read around and belive this would be possible by flashing each GPU to the ASUS bios and tweaking the voltage up to about 2.99 as I have read.

Last time I asked about this people said just to be happy on stock and leave it at that, as I did. I appreciate this but I like to tinker with things and make them run just the little bit faster ( within safe perameters ) so would like these comments to be left out unless i'm thinking about doing something dangerous. I do appreciate all the help from the forum members and would have never got my CPU overclock to work without you guys, Thanks :)

There was an article I read some time ago about using furmark to test the GPU temps. I have tried online to find this but to no avail.

So basically my questions are....

1. What is the best software to use in stressing the gpu ?

2. What is the best software to use in recording the temps ?

3. What setting would said software be run at ? res AA & AF ect.

4. What would be the best benchmark to test this on ?

5. Is this just a stupid idea ?

I would like to be able to run this setup for gamming over long hours, BFBC2 ect. I do understand this would void my warranty but i'm willing to take that risk.

One other thing to mention is that I generally use HWMONITOR to view my temps or SPEEDFAN, however I can only view the temps of one of my cards with HWMONITOR and also with CCC which is rather a pain.

I currently use 10.5 Catalyst Drivers, If anoyone could answer any of these questions and possible send me some links in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanking You,

Kev
 
kevy1986 said:
One other thing to mention is that I generally use HWMONITOR to view my temps or SPEEDFAN, however I can only view the temps of one of my cards with HWMONITOR and also with CCC which is rather a pain.
Click to expand...

Use MSI Afterburner as it can show both 5870's temps in the task bar. :D
 
I have installed MSI Afterburner but it only shows GPU2 in the diagnostics and also under the settings details ? I like to idea of having this shown in the toolbar, any idea on how to get it show both GPU temps, seems funny as it had all other setting for GPU1, voltage, core, fan ect.....
 
msi afterburner---setting---monitoring---gpu1 temp----tick the box show in icon tray.
do the same for gpu2

simples
 
Thanks for the reply, I do understand how to do that but the problem is under the msi afterburner setting only GPU2Temperature is shown, there is no GPU1Temperature to select. I have tired GPU-Z and I can get temps form that but do not like that fact I have to select which card to view sensors on under another tab then switch to another. I have read a bit and beleive it maybe something to do with two differn't brands of 5870 cards causing the problem. Any other ideas or any other kind of software I could use ? Thanks for the reply !
 
Something else strange, in GPU-Z it shows GPU vendor as being ATI ( 1002 ) on both GPU's nothing about Saphire or Gigabyte. I'm gonna go try flash these to ASUS and see what happens.
 
Well i've just updated both my cards to the asus bios, voltages in msi afterburner now tweekable, I can go past 900mhz and best of all I can even view both GPU temps now.

One strange thing I did notice was that I done the saphire first and booted into 800 x 600 res and had to reinstalled gfx drivers, this was done by device manager tho as the ati installed would crash at beginning, still it's all working now on both cards with xfire enabled.

Gonna run a benchmark on stock with heaven, then start a stress test with furmark. If anyone is still up and interested i'd like to know what version of Furmark to use and what res / setup to run at ? Not finding much on google but will keep trying.
 
I thought voltage tweak was a physical addition to the board. Is it software ie possible to voltage tweak once the Asus BIOS is installed? I was tempted to do this too (I have a Sapphire card too, and of course it hits the 900mhz ceiling) but was worried as to what the benefits were when measured against the prospect of bricking a rather expensive card =/
 
With the reference models, with a BIOS change voltage change is possible. Don't think it'll work with a few non-ref cards.
 
Hey Guys, Nice to see some are still awake ;) Well as I understand it most the first ATI HD5870 were all made on the reference design. All were same excet the ASUS model which cost a little bit more but offered voltage tweeks.

As the physical boards are all the same with stock coolers if you flash to the asus bios you then have the ability to tweek the voltages without a limit. This certainly seems to be true as I now have full control over the cards.

I have just ran 2 test on the latest heaven benchmark.....

Heaven Benchmark v2.1
FPS: 24.2
Scores: 611
Min FPS: 3.2
Max FPS: 62.3
Hardware
Binary:
Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system:
Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
CPU flags: 3393MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 HTT
GPU model: ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series 8.732.0.0 CrossFireX 1024Mb
Settings
Render: direct3d11
Mode: 2048x1152 8xAA fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 16x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: extreme

&

Heaven Benchmark v2.1
FPS: 36.1
Scores:909
Min FPS: 5.9
Max FPS: 67.4
Hardware
Binary:
Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system:
Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
CPU flags: 3393MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 HTT
GPU model: ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series 8.732.0.0 CrossFireX 1024Mb
Settings
Render: direct3d11
Mode: 2048x1152 8xAA fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 16x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: normal

These were both run at stock setting. No crashes :)

However I have just ran the Furmark stability test on stock settings for 15 mins and measured temps via msi afterburner.

Results were rather scary - onc card maxed out at 90oc and the other at 80oc.

I'm not particuarly sure what the safe temps are for the 5870 although i'm sure running at 80 - 90 is acceptable but any more than that I would start to worry.

My flat is rather warm with it being summer. I am now gonna try upping the core voltage via msi afterburner and pushing the core clock up a bit also to about 900 to start with leaving the ram along for now. I havea funny feeling the temps are gonna get scary. I understand Furmark is a very hard test for GPU's and it wouldn't be this hard during normal gaming.

Well it's almost 1 and i'm pretty drunk so with me luck !

Hope I don't blow anything up ;)

Will let you know the results soon.
 
Just to mention, both tests are the same, higher than 1080p res but the difference is in the tessellation setting, first is on extream & second is on normal. I generally like to push things as much as I can, everything AA & AF is maxxed.
 
I suggest you create a custom cooling curve in MSI Afterburner, the stock coolers should have no problem keeping the cards cool, although they may get a bit louder in the process.

Trying to keep the GPU temps below 85c in Furmark is never a bad idea.
 
Hi Exsurgo,

If you have any information about temps it would be much appreciated. I have just ran furmark again on....

1200 CORE VOLTAGE

900 CLOCK CORE

I managed to get temps of 91 & 84 at tops, leveled out at 90 & 83. I am quite happy with this so far as expected a lot higher from the original test. I have not set up any customer fan profiles with the msi afterburner right now but I have done before and understand how to. So might do this shortly if required.

I am about to start the Heaven Benchmarks again now on this overclock to check the difference. Will post results shortly, after that I will increase the 950 then to the golden 1Ghz ! I will probably up the voltage before hitting the 1Ghz. I know these cards need more voltage as could not run 900 before without a crash on stock CORE VOLTAGE settings. They seem to be happy for now.

I have set safe perameters in my head but i'm very unsure if there are safe or not.....

Don't want to go over 1300 CORE VOLTAGE

And I don't want to see it hitting over 95oc if possible.

I have moved the Gigabyte the the first slot on mobo to be main rather than the Saphire, I just feel as it cost me 40.00 more it's probably a better card but then who knows at the end of the day. There both probably exactly the same.

:P
 
Ok i've ran the test again on same Heaven Benchmark.

Not seeing a major difference in the figures but I did notice a differnce in stuttering, I felt it was a lot smoother with the higher speeds, however this is only the the start, lets keep pushing ;)

Results from old to new

STOCK EXTREAM



STOCK NORMAL



900 CORE EXTREAM



900 CORE NORMAL



Not big differences at all for the time being. Lets see what happens next tho.

:)
 
Well after a reboot mis afterburner went back to it's old ways, only gave me temps of GPU2 which was great, i leveled out at 90oc however i'm not to know if this is good or bad as there was around a 10oc difference otherwise when I could view both GPU's. Well fingers crossed all is well anyways.....

Ok well it's it's like 2.30am i'm pretty tired so decided to go for the 1Ghz, the setting were changed to....

1300 CORE VOLTAGE

1000 CLOCK CORE

Results as follows.......

1000 CORE EXTREAM



1000 CORE NORMAL



:P
 
Ok well it's past 3.00am in the morning so i'm gonna go to bed now. I found this all to be quite good fun. I hope this helps anyone with the same ideas as I.

I have posted results so anyone can make their own opinion.

My conclusion is that I do beleive overclocking the HD5870 is completely possible and does give a a decent boost over stock performance. I would like all to keep in mind I have only played about with the CORE CLOCK tonight and these are the results are only with a boost on that.

I would like to try take this further tomorrow and push the V-RAM up a bit too and find out what the results are. You can read the bechmarks I have shown above and not notice much of a difference, I would like to add that these were ran at the maximum. From going from the stock speed to 1Ghz I did notice a big difference in screen stutter ( Probably due to a better minimum FPS ), during the Heaven benchmark it was a lot smoother and nicer to view than on the stock settings.

I have ran into problems with msi afterburner viewing both my GPS temps. I did have this option until a reboot. If anyone can help remedy this it would be greatly appreciated as I don't want to go into the unknown blind.

I also am not completely sure of safe temps and voltages and would really like some feedback on this.

This has all been run on auto fan control, the temp has never exceeded 91oc which I am happy with as Furmark reaches this but Heaven will not push it to this extream. I beleive during normal gaming it will not hit these temps. Still this has to be tested.

Well if anyone can give me some advice it would be greatly appreciated. OCUK is a great place full of good people.

Thanks,

Kev
 
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