GTX 670 Gigabyte WIND FORCEx3: got worst clocker ever?

[wunkley]

As title - I just made the leap from my trusty GTX 480 to the gigabyte gtx 670 windforce x 3. To cut a long story short, I didn't get it from ocuk, but I have a terrible clocker and I'm trying to determine whether to send it back or not under the 7 day distance selling dodah to the vendor.

I've spent the whole weekend testing it, and it won't boost above 1170ish on the GPU clock (monitoring in afterburner) no matter what I do. Followed several guides, and running the Heaven 3 bench it always crashes with a 'driver error' message at clock speeds up to/approaching 1180.

My 'kepler boost' is a paltry 40ish. If I run a core clock setting on the GPU of '+75' in afterburner it will boost up to around 1175 in stress tests, games, heaven etc, but heaven will crash after about 10 mins or so. So about 1150 is the max it will boost to safely. (edit - this is with the power limit set to max of 112% and the voltage slider all the way up. The voltage slider has no effect though. Always runs at 1.8 when under heavy load no matter what.)

(Edit - it also came with the latest F12 bios)

I've read that most 670's, even the reference ones with a stock 915/980 often boost up to over 1200 straight out of the box without having to tweak any settings, so I'm a bit cheesed off I forked out the extra for the gigagbyte - what's the point in having a 680 pcb and an 8 pin and 6 pin power connector, and then have such poor overclocks?

So, should I accept I've been unlucky but keep it. I know it's still fast and overclocks a bit, but I'll always have a nagging voice.

Or, should I return it and keep using my 480 for a bit longer, or return it and get a cheaper reference model, which will probably clock higher. Or it might not. Arrrghh. Thoughts?....

 

[wunkley]

One saying return, one keep it. Just how I feel in my mind

Just a quick check - it wouldn't be a power supply issue would it? My antec TP trio (650w) is pretty old now, but it has zero issues powering a gtx 480 with an overclock, so given the 670 requires a lot less power, it won't be that will it causing the 'weak' boost issues?

 

[wunkley]

Cant see it being the psu tbh, particularly as it powered a gtx 480 with an oc on it. Unfortunately it's just luck of the draw as to how any card will overclock.

Cheers bud, my thoughts also on the psu, and I don't want to mess about upgrading that.

I know it's luck of the draw, but I might as well have gone for a £290 reference model and saved a few quid. I looked at reviews/ user reviews of the 670 windforce and people were getting near to 1300 or over on the core, so I sort of feel 'cheated'.

 

[wunkley]

Mine will do 1320, 7586 but ive seen others on here that struggle to go much over 1200 on the core. At stock it boosts to 1180 iirc.

Bah, That's what I wanted

I mean, it runs amazingly cool. My case has pretty good airfllow and I haven't seen this card go over 57 degrees, which is amazing, and it's quiet as a mouse, so that's all good.

 

[wunkley]

Thanks for the input so far folks. I think I'm going to return it tomorrow, as it will continue to niggle. Life's too short and all that.

I'm now thinking of going for the EVGA 670 FTW edition. Hopefully have better luck getting some high clocks with that one...

 

[wunkley]

Default stock boost is as much of a lottery as what clocks you will get from the card.

Having said that I would be pretty annoyed if a 670 WF wouldn't hit 1180, heck the 670 WF I had boosted to 1189 out of the box, 1260 with a custom bios and would clock to 1365+ along with heavy (7500+) clocks on the memory.

Its a gamble nothing is guaranteed, nothing to say the card you buy as a replacement won't be a poor clocker too.

Exactly. Annoyed is how I feel, hence I'm DSRing it.

Looks like you have an ATI 7970 now? What made you go for that over the 670? I'd be veeeery tempted (great offers at £299 on ocuk at mo) to jump back to ATI if it was for gaming only (the 3GB mem is a masive plus as well), but I also do video editing work and the nvidia cuda boost is a massive plus I don't want to lose in premiere pro.

 

[wunkley]

Thought I'd post a quick update in case folks are interested...

EVGA 670 FTW edition arrived today. It boosts to 1176 straight out of the box with no messing about.

Had a quick play at overclocking using Afterburner. Managed to run it stable with a +65 on the core so it runs at 1241, and the mem at 3400. Not tried pushing mem further yet.

I tried a clock of +80 on the core but heaven bench crashed after a few minutes. I'm pretty happy with that so this is a keeper.

My only slight problem is - the Gigabyte WF is a lot quieter. To run the overclock above and keep temps under 70 I have to make sure the fan is going around 65%, which is a tad noisy. I'd say it runs about 10-15 degrees hotter than the gigagbyte on average.
It's still ok though (and quieter than my gtx480, which also has a WF cooler but had to run at mega fan speeds), and I'd rather have the headroom for messing about with overclocking

 

[wunkley]

I think given the whole 'silicon lottery' situation I'm pretty happy now. Looks like this EVGA is neither golden, but neither is it rubbish. Somewhere in the middle, and if I can be bothered messing further down the line (bios mods etc) then who knows, it might be much better.

I've had gigabyte cards before, never had an EVGA and everyone bangs on about how good they are, so I fancied a change. And, I only paid about £20 extra over the reference version, so not too fussed

 

[wunkley]

What speed does the fan run at on the EVGA 670 FTW, if you just run it at factory settings?

Don't know exactly, can find out if you really want? (Idle and full load?)

*edit* - it's currently idling at 30% (1050rpm) fan speed now (minimum possible), at 31 degrees.

The default auto fan profile just isn't aggressive enough. I've made a custom one in AB to keep it under 70 degrees. 65% speed seems to keep it between 60-70 degrees in heaven bench. There's a big noise difference in quite a short range too. At 50-55% fan speed I can barely hear it above my case fans etc, at 60 speed it gets noisier and at 65% it's quite noticeable, though not bad really.

On the noise front - if I'd not used/ heard the gigabyte WF in comparison I would have been well happy, as it's still much quieter than my 480.

 

[wunkley]

So, just in case I do feel like pushing this card a bit more how do you go about upping the voltage? Makes no difference in afterburner, maxes at 1.75 I think.

From what I've seen you need to flash the bios? I've seen that custom bios thread on another forum, but is there an idiots guide to flashing a graphics card bios, preferably just using a windows based prog? I'v tried before in the past and never got anywhere - always got messages saying won't work, or same file etc...

 

[wunkley]

It's easy as pie through the bios buddy.

You just need a USB stick which you format in such a way it's bootable from, copy over nvflash program to it and the BIOS you choose.

Then you boot into the bios, type nvflash -4 -5 -6 biosname.rom and it will do the rest for you.

Just need to make sure you backup your original bios before hand which you can do though GPUz.

Cheers fella. Might give it a go if I'm feeling brave.

On another note, I'm a bit confused after reading the EVGA forums. A 'firmware' update has been released for this card a few weeks back than you just download and run an .exe. That's not the same as flashing a new bios is it? Sorry if it's a daft Q but I've been out of the loop geek wise for a while. See this thread here: http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=1703680&mpage=1

Seems some people report it lowers performance at the expense of stability...

 

[wunkley]

Yes it's the same sort of thing really. It's just them updating their bios.

Should I update it or not???

I've backed up the original out of GPUz, so if I don't like it for whatever reason, I could flash the original back using nvflash no?

 

[wunkley]

I think it's bad returning something because it won't overclock.

It's not specified to overclock to a certain value. It's sheer luck. Would you keep sending cards back until you got one you were satisfied with overclock wise??

If it was my company I would tell you where to go!

I kind of agree with you. It's not something I've done before, and I'm going to keep the Evga ftw one, even though it's 'only' a 'medium' performer it seems in terms of over clocking.

However, the 7 day dsr law is there, and I'm going to use it. If it was your company you wouldn't tell me where to go, because it would be against retail law.

I actually reckon the gigabyte card I got might have been a return. The box wasn't cellophane wrapped (like my Evga one today was) and the static bag was sealed with sellotape, not the usual fancy stuff.

 

[wunkley]

There's another thread on the go at the moment about sealed gigabyte cards etc.

It may be the norm.

Just read that cheers! Interesting. I Wonder what the score is. I seriously reckon my gigabyte might have been a return, probably by some sad idiot just like me who wasnt happy with the non guaranteed overclock

But, they can't do this. Will read the other thread with interest.

 

[wunkley]

nope not the worse my EVGA's only do about +17mhz on the core. The Max Kepler boost/clock I can get is just shy of 1150mhz , anything beyond that I get 3d or folding lockups

Hooray! Only joking - always nice to know someone's worse off than you though aint it. Sorry

So is that the EVGA SOC version in your sig, not the FTW version?

 

[wunkley]

Interesting update to this issue. It turns out the worst clocking Windforce GTX 670 ever, might have been rubbish for a reason. Looks like it is faulty, and possibly was all along.

In the last few weeks Skyrim was doing really odd graphical artifacts every so often, and I couldn't tell if it was bad mods, possible driver issue, faulty SLI bridge, power supply possibly struggling, or what.
Tried loads of things and was about to re-install windows as a last ditch hope, and then finally nailed it down to the windforce being faulty.
Skyrim was too random in whether it went 'funny' or not, so I ran each card (my other is EVGA FTW) on its own in the top slot with the Heaven 3 benchmark totally maxed out. I'd done this before, but not sat through and watched each and every test run, I'd just let it run and walked off. This time I sat and watched eagle eyed and 4 specific tests on every run through would shows graphics and textures spiking/ making odd triangles all over the place. Symptoms of faulty memory, so I think? (no overclocking by the way).

Did it every time I tested but only on these 4 individual tests. The EVGA was fine running the same test, so conclusive in my view that the Windforce is faulty. It's off for RMA with gigabyte at the moment.

So, was it faulty all along/ on the edge of messing up, hence the really poor boost and overclock for a Windforce 670?

 

[wunkley]

My point is it does not matter what clocks a card can reach, its the measured performance it can produce that counts.

I think you're missing the point. Perhaps my original windforce had such a poor boost, because it was faulty/ right on the edge of developing the fault. ie, the very, very poor boost clock on this card was a symptom that the card was actually not as it should be.