Does this performance seem correct for my new MSI 7970 lightning?

castingflame · 14 Oct 2012 at 05:41

I have spent the day reading about tuning my 7970 and have ended up with the following in Afterburner.

Core 1093
Power Limit +20%
Core Clock 1152
Memory Clock 1501

With stock cooling the temp stays around 65/70 degrees under load.

I have set the display options in SLEEPING DOG to EXTREME. I am only getting 28/34 fps. What am I doing wrong? I thought that this card would run any game at full settings at 1920 x 1080 at 60fps.

I will have the 7970 running 3 x screens next week for games. My £400 investment is worrying me :eek:

Is this normal performance for this card on stock cooling?

If so what "reasonable" water cooling do you recommend to get the frame rate up bearing in mind I will be using 3 x 1920 x 1080 monitors in eyefinity mode.

Thanks

Paul

Stev · 14 Oct 2012 at 06:48

whats your cpu? that could be a bottleneck

castingflame · 14 Oct 2012 at 07:19

Hi stev.

Its a i5 3570k running at 4.7GHz. I have also tried the CPU at stock speeds but I still only get a frame rate in the 30's in the game itself.

Tephnos · 14 Oct 2012 at 07:35

I would have waited on buying a lightning. MSI recently announced a BE edition and are selling it now.

The old R7970 used older chips, do can't overclock as well. Consider the BE the 'Ghz' edition of the Lightning series.

Sighn · 14 Oct 2012 at 07:52

I'd have thought the card would run Sleeping Dogs extreme at about 50fps if V-Sync isn't active.

castingflame · 14 Oct 2012 at 07:55

Tephnos said:
I would have waited on buying a lightning. MSI recently announced a BE edition and are selling it now.

The old R7970 used older chips, do can't overclock as well. Consider the BE the 'Ghz' edition of the Lightning series.

This is the card I bought from OCsUK last week. https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-152-MS

I am confused. Is this not the latest card then?

If I change the Anti-Aliasing from "Extreme" to "High" then I get the full 60fps.

castingflame · 14 Oct 2012 at 07:56

Sighn said:
I'd have thought the card would run Sleeping Dogs extreme at about 50fps if V-Sync isn't active.

I was just reading about that. Where is it set?

Edit: Ok found it in CCC but I don't believe this is the issue. My monitors run at 60fps so that is my limit. My issue is that Running Sleeping dogs on Extreme Anti-Aliasing drops the frame rate by 20fps.

pgi947 · 14 Oct 2012 at 10:26

Tephnos said:
I would have waited on buying a lightning. MSI recently announced a BE edition and are selling it now.

The old R7970 used older chips, do can't overclock as well. Consider the BE the 'Ghz' edition of the Lightning series.

My 7970 lightning at 1350/1950 completely disagrees with that. On average the lightnings are the best clockers on both the red and green team. Though provided it takes the current waterblock I will be grabbing a be. I also smell a possible AMD price drop, from what I understand the be retails for around £315.

Edit: sounds like sleeping dogs has a daft gpu crippling aa option much how the witcher 2 had ubersampling. Just don't use it.

Gregster · 14 Oct 2012 at 10:37

pgi947 said:
My 7970 lightning at 1350/1950 completely disagrees with that. On average the lightnings are the best clockers on both the red and green team.

+1

Rusty0611 · 14 Oct 2012 at 11:16

Tephnos said:
I would have waited on buying a lightning. MSI recently announced a BE edition and are selling it now.

The old R7970 used older chips, do can't overclock as well. Consider the BE the 'Ghz' edition of the Lightning series.

They're the same chips though and just with a higher base clock speed and a boost feature....

Nickolp1974 · 14 Oct 2012 at 14:11

castingflame said:
If I change the Anti-Aliasing from "Extreme" to "High" then I get the full 60fps.

AA high is equal to max AA in other games, Extreme is what it is, a extreme version of AA

pgi947 · 14 Oct 2012 at 14:28

Nickolp1974 said:
AA high is equal to max AA in other games, Extreme is what it is, a extreme version of AA

Yup, its a pointless 'look how demanding I can be' option as was ubersampling in the Witcher 2.

LtMatt · 14 Oct 2012 at 15:06

To play Sleeping Dogs on Extreme you need a single 7970 overclocked to 1200 on the core. This will net you extremely smooth fps.

In the benchmark you can see my minimum fps is 37, well in game it will never drop below 40-45 and that's worst case scenario.

Your scores do seem low though, so id advise you to use the same driver and caps file as me.

12.9 Beta Driver + 12.9 caps, both of which can be downloaded at the following link.

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/beta/amd_catalyst_12.9_beta_dotnet4.exe

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/hotfix/catalyst_application_profiles/amd_catalyst_12.9_cap1.exe

Tephnos · 14 Oct 2012 at 15:14

Rusty0611 said:
They're the same chips though and just with a higher base clock speed and a boost feature....

pgi947 said:
My 7970 lightning at 1350/1950 completely disagrees with that. On average the lightnings are the best clockers on both the red and green team. Though provided it takes the current waterblock I will be grabbing a be. I also smell a possible AMD price drop, from what I understand the be retails for around £315.

Edit: sounds like sleeping dogs has a daft gpu crippling aa option much how the witcher 2 had ubersampling. Just don't use it.

From the majority of people who bought a 7970 on overclock.net, it doesn't seem to be the case. The 7970 lightnings were pretty bad clockers, especially compared to their green team equivalent. It was confirmed that the Sapphire Vapor-X used newer chips whilst the Lightning used older ones, which is why they couldn't clock as high for some reason.

You got lucky with yours being able to clock that high for a 7970, trust me. I'd rather wait for the BE and have the chances skewed more in my favor.

Still stupid that the DVI ports on the BE edition are STILL single link. Bah.

LtMatt · 14 Oct 2012 at 15:20

pgi947 said:
My 7970 lightning at 1350/1950

Holy crap. :eek:

Highest i can get on the core is 1225, memory up to 1750. I think the core can go higher, possibly up to 1250 but with reference cooling i can't keep the card cool enough at that high temp+volts.

At 1200 core i can allow temps to go up to 88c+ without any problems (though i don't) but once i go up to 1225 core i need to keep temps below 78c or artifacts appear. 1250 core temps need to be blow 75c.

shankly1985 · 14 Oct 2012 at 18:16

Dont play SD with extreme AA it kills performance. High vs Extreme they not really much difference for the performance hit.

humbug · 14 Oct 2012 at 18:24

pgi947 said:
My 7970 lightning at 1350/1950.......

Good Grief! [Drool]

pgi947 · 14 Oct 2012 at 19:33

Tephnos said:
From the majority of people who bought a 7970 on overclock.net, it doesn't seem to be the case. The 7970 lightnings were pretty bad clockers, especially compared to their green team equivalent. It was confirmed that the Sapphire Vapor-X used newer chips whilst the Lightning used older ones, which is why they couldn't clock as high for some reason.

You got lucky with yours being able to clock that high for a 7970, trust me. I'd rather wait for the BE and have the chances skewed more in my favor.

Still stupid that the DVI ports on the BE edition are STILL single link. Bah.

Poor clocking Lightnings or just people that don't know what they are doing with them? Granted on air they aren't going to be smashing any records, but then again for overclocking, these cards aren't aimed at air cooling. From what I've seen the average core speed on a watercooled Lightning is 1320 - 1360mhz, at that point you hit a voltage barrier, I have seen the odd one drop out under 1250mhz, but those were on air.

I'm not saying your wrong, or what you have read is wrong but from what I have seen you are, on average, more likely to get a good overclock from a Lightning 7970, only time will really tell if the BE is merely a vBIOS update or not, I'm not at all convinced by the claims these 'GHZ' cards have better yields or whatever to give clock headroom.

I couldn't agree more about the DVI ports however, if it truly is a 'revised' card then surely MSI would have sorted something out in that area.

1350/1950 for now, any more on the memory I get memory correction kicking in, as soon as I find what dark dirty method I need to raise the voltage I will be aiming for 1400/1950 @1.4v for some bench runs.

Rusty0611 · 14 Oct 2012 at 19:50

Tephnos said:
From the majority of people who bought a 7970 on overclock.net, it doesn't seem to be the case. The 7970 lightnings were pretty bad clockers, especially compared to their green team equivalent. It was confirmed that the Sapphire Vapor-X used newer chips whilst the Lightning used older ones, which is why they couldn't clock as high for some reason.

You got lucky with yours being able to clock that high for a 7970, trust me. I'd rather wait for the BE and have the chances skewed more in my favor.

Still stupid that the DVI ports on the BE edition are STILL single link. Bah.

But the Ghz edition chip is the same as the 7970 vanilla chip.

Tephnos · 14 Oct 2012 at 20:14

Rusty0611 said:
But the Ghz edition chip is the same as the 7970 vanilla chip.

Source?

I hear different.