ATI overdrive on 4870 - WARNING

[tipes]

Hi all,

Thought I would post my experience.

Ordered one of the Sapphire 4870 1Gb cards that are on offer this week. Card turned up Friday no problems. Got the card installed with latest Catalyst 9.1 drivers and all was going great.

Having been an Nvidia man for the past many years I had no experience of ATI cards/drivers etc sooo noticed the overdrive clocking thingy so decided to give it a go.

Standard clocks are 750 core/900 memory - so I run the overdrive auto tune which is supposed to overclock the card in a safe manner and the figures go to 840 core and wait for it 1190 on the memory !!!!!

Ran a few benchies and it was great so I clocked back down to standard.

Came back later and decided to try again but this time it would only clock to 1040 on the memory - no big deal I thought but then I discover that none of the benchmarks will run at these settings i.e 3dmark06/Vantage without stopping with errors.

Having thought about all this I have come to the conclusion that the memory on the card has now been damaged by an over enthuisiastic first overclock - so be warned - keep an eye on the figures and if they look as if they are getting too high - back out while you can.

I am gutted to have spoiled such a good card so early on - but what annoys me is this overclock facility was provided with the driver and was supposed to do it in a safe fashion - I am not amused. Thoughts?

Mark

 

[Sipha]

Unlikely its been physically damaged imo, what sort of temps did you see ?

 

[magicroundabout]

i've the 512 version of yours and when i first ran Autotune i got 840/1150 (or somthing similar)

when running 3D Mark06 it crashed so i dropped it to 800/1000 (slightly more than the toxic version) and it's never been a problem since.

Maybe try doing the same with yours?

 

[tipes]

Unlikely its been physically damaged imo, what sort of temps did you see ?

Thanks for the reply - sorry did not see the temps while the benching was going on as it takes the whole screen.

Have since run a memory diagnostic on the graphics card and it passed ok (Pc check) so although it now won't clock anywhere near as high on the memory, and I get errors if I go over 810/1000.

Just seems as though there was potential there for damage by the over enthuisiastic first overclock.

Mark

 

[tipes]

i've the 512 version of yours and when i first ran Autotune i got 840/1150 (or somthing similar)

when running 3D Mark06 it crashed so i dropped it to 800/1000 (slightly more than the toxic version) and it's never been a problem since.

Maybe try doing the same with yours?

Hi,

Thanks for the reply - so you were not able to bench at the first high figure reached by overdrive? Mine did and worked well at the time - but I am now wondering whether the temps got too high and maybe damaged the memory slightly as ever since I can no longer get anywhere near that fiorst clock and am even having problems running at more than 810/1000.

Oh well perhaps I am worrying too much over nothing.

Mark

 

[magicroundabout]

yeah i wouldn't worry tbh.

mine showed artifects all over the screen when running hence the reason i clocked it back.

as for the temps i'm sure it wouldn't overheat as these new fans are very good at keeping temps low.

What speed have you got yours running at?

 

[tipes]

yeah i wouldn't worry tbh.

mine showed artifects all over the screen when running hence the reason i clocked it back.

as for the temps i'm sure it wouldn't overheat as these new fans are very good at keeping temps low.

What speed have you got yours running at?

Got mine running at stock at the moment, but it will run ok at about 810/1000 very similar to yours - I did notice though that it seems you are better off setting the fan manually to about 40-50% if you are running overclocked as you then control temps better and it seemed to stop the artifacts and locking up.

Mark

 

[Jakus]

I would doubt you would damage memory IC's by short term overclocking, I don't think You can look at them in the same way as "over revving " a car engine which does cause accumulative damage ! but Over volting and over temping will damage them.
It would be nice if someone in the industry could confirm the above though !

Another point is never use any kind of automatic overclocking...ever !

Overclocking headroom is directly proportional to components running temps, I'm sure if You let the whole pc cool down You would get about the same results from that autotune, Try it and It will put Your mind at rest

 

[gurusan]

You can't physically damage memory by having it at too high of a frequency. It will simply error out and crash or artifact...

If it gets too hot it could be damaged but with gDDR5 this is HIGHLY unlikely.

 

[magicroundabout]

Got mine running at stock at the moment, but it will run ok at about 810/1000 very similar to yours - I did notice though that it seems you are better off setting the fan manually to about 40-50% if you are running overclocked as you then control temps better and it seemed to stop the artifacts and locking up.

Mark

yeah i have mine manually set to 40% and it keeps temps really well controlled.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

I'm running one of the original 4870 512mb here. On my card with the Asus TOP bios and higher speeds I find fan speed of 33% gives me a good balance; no devastating whine from the fan, yet the card stays reasonably cool with an idle temp of mid 40s.

 

[EvilOne]

I set my momory too high when i was 'testing' overclocks on my 4870. I had the same problems with artifacts so i just turned it down a bit then rebooted and everything worked fine again.

 

[jvowles]

Indeed, unlikely it has been damaged, unless your temps went through the roof.

 

[liquidex]

Yeah it shouldn't be damaged, its not like you are increasing the voltage or anything. Overdrive for me always seems to think the card can clock higher then it actually can. Best to just manually do it.

 

[tipes]

Yeah it shouldn't be damaged, its not like you are increasing the voltage or anything. Overdrive for me always seems to think the card can clock higher then it actually can. Best to just manually do it.

I agree - should always o clock manually for best control, but what is interesting here is that when the overdrive did the overclocking the first time and went so high - it also benchmarked fine, but ever since then I cannot get anywhere near that figure without the benchmark crashing out.

So how is it that the card apparently clocked to this apparently insane memory speed and worked ok but not since?

I just find it puzzling

Mark

 

[tipes]

Yeah it shouldn't be damaged, its not like you are increasing the voltage or anything. Overdrive for me always seems to think the card can clock higher then it actually can. Best to just manually do it.

I would doubt you would damage memory IC's by short term overclocking, I don't think You can look at them in the same way as "over revving " a car engine which does cause accumulative damage ! but Over volting and over temping will damage them.
It would be nice if someone in the industry could confirm the above though !

Another point is never use any kind of automatic overclocking...ever !

Overclocking headroom is directly proportional to components running temps, I'm sure if You let the whole pc cool down You would get about the same results from that autotune, Try it and It will put Your mind at rest

Hi,

Thanks for the reply - but see my post later on in the thread. I can not ever since that first run get anywhere near the same memory clock which I find strange as it benched ok as well, but I suppose it was very high though at a 32% memory overclock.

Me puzzled

 

[Monkeynut]

Perhaps the ATi program got confused and hadn't actually overclocked it even though it said it did, and so the benches were done actually at stock.

 

[tipes]

Perhaps the ATi program got confused and hadn't actually overclocked it even though it said it did, and so the benches were done actually at stock.

Going by the scores - I think it deffo overclocked.Can't remember the scores but they were very good or at least I thought so, faster than stock anyway.

Mark

 

[Jakus]

I don't think many of us actually registered the memory over clock !!
There is no way memory on the 1GB cards will run that fast remember GDDR5 is quad pumped so actual speed is 4X, as You found out the autotune is unreliable so totally discount that number