How to overclock a 7850 past 1050MHz?

555BUK · 17 Sep 2012 at 16:42

I was talking overclocked performance rather than out of box. Stock GPU clock for the 7850 is 860MHz vs 980MHz for the GTX 660. The GTX 660 also has it's boost mode which takes the core up to 1033MHz and give it a 20% clock speed advantage.

Now, most 7850's will clock easily up to 1150MHz, but the 660 has very little headroom due to voltage limiting and would do well to reach the same 1150MHz within boost mode. My guess is that both cards "real" overclocked performance will be very close, much like when overclocking 7970's and GTX680 to safe limits. It may even be that the 7850 is the slightly faster card, until someone figures out how to unlock GTX 660 BIOS voltages.

liamcrane · 18 Sep 2012 at 09:48

Installed trixx today as this seems to be the only application that gives me voltage control and core control beyond 11780mhz and got my 7850 to 1180/1350 on 1.110v. It seemed to run fine in BF3, whats another good benchmark test to run for stability these days?

CyberCrow · 18 Sep 2012 at 10:52

Unigine Heaven
3d mark

Prozel · 18 Sep 2012 at 11:43

With releases like Borderlands 2 I felt like tweaking with my 7850.

My question is: Would it be dangerous to runs same clock as on page 1, with a reference card from Club 3D without damageing it in longer terms of use? It can get a bit loud but is that really dangerous?

Cheers

Spenty · 18 Sep 2012 at 11:50

liamcrane said:
Installed trixx today as this seems to be the only application that gives me voltage control and core control beyond 11780mhz and got my 7850 to 1180/1350 on 1.110v. It seemed to run fine in BF3, whats another good benchmark test to run for stability these days?

Your card must bench nice at 11780 mhz

liamcrane · 18 Sep 2012 at 12:23

Spenty said:
Your card must bench nice at 11780 mhz

lol just seen that hehe

its an amazing clocker

jas72 · 18 Sep 2012 at 13:36

ok at page 80 can someone give a tldr; on what to do out of the box? step by step

would it be correct to

a) delete current drivers
b) swap cards
c) don't accept win 7 drivers
d) install latest drivers from AMD
e) install gpu tweak
f) ramp up the overclock to xxxx/yyyy ? (or does it need an incremenatal oc?)

As you can see my last card was a 4870 512MB and never overclocked the card. (it's been a while)

as always thanks for any and all replies

CyberCrow · 18 Sep 2012 at 17:14

Prozel said:
With releases like Borderlands 2 I felt like tweaking with my 7850.

My question is: Would it be dangerous to runs same clock as on page 1, with a reference card from Club 3D without damageing it in longer terms of use? It can get a bit loud but is that really dangerous?

Cheers

Yes it's dangerous, not every card Oc's the same.
Build your Oc's up in stages like Oc 20-25 each time on core.
Once you've Oc'd then run a couple of stress tests if they show to be stable boost another 20-25.
When it starts to get unstable start to alter the volt, but make sure you read up on what the recommended MAX volt is for your card.

pandem0nium · 18 Sep 2012 at 19:13

hers my heaven results:

1200 / 5600 @ 1.225V

Quite happy with that

Do you guys thing my Cpu is bottlenecking the GPU? or the fact that the PCIe is 2.0?

Spenty · 18 Sep 2012 at 19:29

CPU most likely. I had a phenom 2 955 @ 4ghz and when I upgraded to a 2500k I had better scores with the same GPU.

Amatsubu · 18 Sep 2012 at 21:29

Could you recommend me a good but not overly expensive side case intake fan to help me decrease the temp of my card?

Bradmax57 · 18 Sep 2012 at 22:20

Amatsubu said:
Could you recommend me a good but not overly expensive side case intake fan to help me decrease the temp of my card?

Well anything is going to be better than nothing, whats your budget and are you fussed about noise vs performance etc?

Amatsubu · 19 Sep 2012 at 08:18

Well, unless it sounds like a small hairdryer (e.g. like my MSI @ 70% fan rpm;p), I'm not that concerned about noise levels. Obviously, I'd rather want it to be silent and very efficient at the same time but if it cools exceptionally well while being a bit audible then I think its worth the trade-off. As for the prices, I live in Poland and I'm not exactly aware about the price differences but I guess something like Gentle Typhoon is well within my reach. I can also shell out a bit more if its worth it.

An00bis · 19 Sep 2012 at 20:35

Corsario said:
I think turbo is on by default, it only "kicks" under some circumstances.

For what i´ve seen, in 3dmark11 the results are good, but in Heaven i only get an average of 24fps don´t know why. I use same settings that I see on the benchmarks here.

well i think it kicks in by default if it's first enabled, I'm sure your cpu (stronger than mine) can get like near 8000 points. Well if you actually care about those things, points and such. I think in real life scenarios it only makes a difference in stuff like video editing/converting/archive compressing and other cpu-intensive tasks.

oweneades · 19 Sep 2012 at 23:43

Hi all,

I recently got a MSI HD7850 TFIII off of a member here and had a couple of questions:

1) Should I be able to control the voltage through MSI afterburner? I was expecting to be able to but for whatever reason it is greyed out (enabled in the settings menu).

2) What is the stock voltage for a (generic) HD7850? Running Asus Tweak and hitting "default" sets the voltage to 1210mv, which just doesn't seem right to me.

On a separate note, I bought this card to mess around with and I must say I am impressed. Despite asking it to run a resolution of 3600x1920 it is coping surprisingly well . In my 5 minute "playable settings" benchmark run through (High settings with shadows on medium and no HBAO), it managed 39.6FPS at Max CCC overclocks. In the same run through a stock GTX680 managed 52.6FPS (overclocked 61.9FPS).

Ultimately I will be looking towards crossfire (again to mess around with), but for now I will see just how far this little card can go.

Prozel · 20 Sep 2012 at 07:56

CyberCrow said:
Yes it's dangerous, not every card Oc's the same.
Build your Oc's up in stages like Oc 20-25 each time on core.
Once you've Oc'd then run a couple of stress tests if they show to be stable boost another 20-25.
When it starts to get unstable start to alter the volt, but make sure you read up on what the recommended MAX volt is for your card.

Actually, I've been running the setup I talked for a day now. So far I haven't had any problems but I've only played Mass Effect 2 which probably not push it as much as Borderlands 2.

CyberCrow · 20 Sep 2012 at 10:15

Prozel said:
Actually, I've been running the setup I talked for a day now. So far I haven't had any problems but I've only played Mass Effect 2 which probably not push it as much as Borderlands 2.

ME2 is a really old game that wouldn't push your rig (well if you'd posted your rig that is)that much any way,if you've managed to run your card with no problems then great this is the result your looking for.
As i said in an earlier post not every card clocks the same as the next one 90% of the time.
Different brands different hard ware all come in to effect of what restrictions or errors you'll come across.

kharma45 · 22 Sep 2012 at 15:29

oweneades said:
Hi all,

I recently got a MSI HD7850 TFIII off of a member here and had a couple of questions:

1) Should I be able to control the voltage through MSI afterburner? I was expecting to be able to but for whatever reason it is greyed out (enabled in the settings menu).

2) What is the stock voltage for a (generic) HD7850? Running Asus Tweak and hitting "default" sets the voltage to 1210mv, which just doesn't seem right to me.

On a separate note, I bought this card to mess around with and I must say I am impressed. Despite asking it to run a resolution of 3600x1920 it is coping surprisingly well . In my 5 minute "playable settings" benchmark run through (High settings with shadows on medium and no HBAO), it managed 39.6FPS at Max CCC overclocks. In the same run through a stock GTX680 managed 52.6FPS (overclocked 61.9FPS).

Ultimately I will be looking towards crossfire (again to mess around with), but for now I will see just how far this little card can go.

Afterburner doesn't let you control voltages on the card, I use Trixx to do that and it works well for me.

Amatsubu · 22 Sep 2012 at 22:53

There is something wrong with AB, it doesn't let me control the volts on my MSI 7850 either. As far as the stock voltage goes, I think it differs depending on the cards ASIC quality. Mine is running @ 1,138v stock. You can use Asus GPU Tweak for voltage control as long as you're happy with 1170 mhz core OC limit.

oweneades · 23 Sep 2012 at 15:15

Thanks for the advice RE: Afterburner. Seems odd that it can't control the voltage.

I will try out Trixx.

So far the card is happy at 1150/5800 but the scaling at 3600x1920 beyond the CCC max clocks is relatively poor. Upping the memory to 6200 was perfectly stable but yielded no benefits. 50Mhz jump in the core clock gave me 0.5FPS which isn't really worth it.

I can only presume it is becoming shader bound with increases in clock speed only able to do so much.

Crossfire is tempting but at the current prices I would rather just pay an extra £50 and get a HD7950.