ASIC quality, What does it mean?

[Something Else]

Just downloaded GPU-Z and my sapphire 7970 (on air atm but will be water soon) gets an ASIC reading of 76.3%


Could anyone give me an idea of what this means? Do I have a good clocker? The card is voltage locked i think but I run 1100/1500 with just the power slider in ccc set to 20% never tried for more as it does what I want and the temps get a bit mad.

As far as I know its different for air vs water

 

[Rroff]

On its own it doesn't mean much, you need to know how the same cores with different ASIC qualities behave before you can put much significance on it.

 

[LtMatt]

Tahiti cards are grouped into Asic percentage qualities based on how much voltage is required for a card to be stable at stock speeds.

According to the author of RivaTuner and MSI Afterburner, the correlation between voltage and quality is as follows:

ASIC quality < 75% - 1.1750v
ASIC quality < 80% - 1.1125v
ASIC quality < 85% - 1.0500v
ASIC quality < 90% - 1.0250v
ASIC quality ≤ 100% - 1.0250v

That applies for 7970 cards only. 7950's are slightly lower. I don't know the exact figures for those.

As a rule of thumb high asic is better for air coolers and low asic is better for water coolers. Low asic cards accept more voltage than high asic cards.

 

[Something Else]

right ok then.

The only reason im going water is to keep the card quiet tbh. Also will allow me to stuff another 7970 on the asus MVG but with new cards coming out soon im not sure if i will bother.

Cheers

 

[Locky]

ASIC quality, What does it mean?

In short nothing.

 

[se_vietboi]

ASIC quality, What does it mean?

In short nothing.

+1

 

[Five.Stars]

I would say the figures posted above by matt are fairly accurate, given that 1 of my 7970's (reference powercolor) has an asic of ~80% and has a stock voltage of 1.112V and my newer 7970 (MSI OC) has an asic of 60% but has a stock voltage of 1.174V, although it does have a factory overclock.

Unsure of how these figures correlate to overclockifg potential. My powercolor was a decent clocker on air and very good under water. I've tet to test out msi as just got it and not fitted block and installed it in loop yet. Although it did hit the ccc 1125/1575 limit on the stock 1.174V, while i quickly tested it with stock cooler, so I am hopeful it should be a decent clcoker as well

 

[555BUK]

All of my 7850/7870's (6 total) have clocked in order of ASIC quality. I had two in their 60's which were pretty poor, two high 80's which were very good and two in the middle which were okay. The best was a reference Powercolor 7850 which benched 1400MHz on air (89.4% ASIC), and the worst was a MSI TF3 which struggled to do 1100MHz.

For me there appears a tangible link better ASIC quality and GPU performance. Why else would AMD program their BIOS to use lower voltages on higher ASIC's? Lower voltage requirements mean less leakage, which mean less heat, which can increase (but not guarantee) overclocks.