7950 +20 power?

[MrMartyn1984]

Hi all,

I'm running my HIS iceQ 7950 at 1150/1450 (through CCC only), voltage 1.250?

Yesterday whilst reading through some posts I noticed people commenting on increasing the power upto +20, now mine was set at just zero.

I've kept Bioshock at a particular part of the game with the exact screen and my FPS goes from 109 (zero power increase), 120 (15%) and 131 (20%). What exactly is my card doing to increase the FPS and is this safe?

the cards maxing out at 82degrees which is concerning me a little but then my house is bloody warm too (

 

[Doco]

All the +20% is allow the card to draw more power (wattage) to power it, if you dont have it enabled the card with throttle itself to meet thermal requirments etc - amd official talk

"AMD PowerTune technology helps enable higher performance that is optimized to the thermal limits of the GPU by dynamically adjusting the engine clock during runtime based on an internally calculated GPU power assessment. AMD PowerTune technology also helps to improve the mechanism to deal with applications that would otherwise exceed the GPU’s TDP. By dynamically managing the engine clock speeds based on calculations which determine the proximity of the GPU to its TDP limit, AMD PowerTune allows for the GPU to run within its TDP budget at higher nominal clock speeds than otherwise possible."

Your 82 degrees is a bit toaster than my own temps but its just because of the recent heatwave so in the long run I'd say you'd be okay, otherwise you can just drop the settings for a while .

 

[Drangueos]

my room is 30C atm...
and my hottest graphics card is 72C while gaming and 45 on idle. (with my case closed, if i open my case the temp drops 3C).
I'm using the MSI TFIII, you should get about the same temperature with your HIS... maybe you should make a custom fan profile.

 

[JamesC08]

You should try dropping the voltage.
I have 1150/1500 with 1.15V set in AB with my MSI TF3.
Seems to hold up fine in the synthetic benchmarks, but I'll need to do more testing.

 

[Doco]

In response to jamec08 above - With the His "Boost" cards (not sure if this is the card OP has) if you do indeed want to change the voltage (keep lower temps/prolong life etc) you'll have to download and install one of the modified bios from - http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18519021&highlight=7950+boost+bios - as the boost function keeps the 1.25 volts constantly - if you try to change the voltage - all it does is change the non-boost voltage, as soon as the card is in use and boosts itself to higher clocks it will still keep the 1.25v

 

[MrMartyn1984]

I do have the "boost" card. To be honest I don't really fancy flashing the bios on the card, took me long enough to get a decent card and I don't want to risk blowing it up.

I've dropped it down to +15, cant see any difference apart from FRAPS saying 6-7fps less, so i'll keep it like that until the weather cools down a bit.

 

[panyan]

I don't really fancy flashing the bios on the card, took me long enough to get a decent card and I don't want to risk blowing it up

that would have to be the most catastrophic flash of a graphics card tbh