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OCing card... Power Limit?

WuMyster

WuMyster

WuMyster

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28 Feb 2012
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London, UK
Most people guide you to increase the voltage and core clock etc. but what does the power limit do?
Im currently OCing my 7950 at 1.15V @ 1050mhz and just realise I am able to adjust the power limit (MSI Afterburner). Some guides suggest that increasing the power limit should be used for "rookies" (if you know what i mean). So does that mean i can tweak my card by altering the voltage AND power limit?
 
Right okay. Anymore people wanting to share your thoughts?
Currently got the GPU at 1.2V @ 1150mhz. 0.5V doesn't seem worth it for 100mhz. Then again, Max temps are only at 64 degrees on air.
 
Thefogo is spot on, it simply allows the card to use more than the default power limit when it can (ie it's not too hot, etc). Look at any review of the 7970 when it launched and they all advised to open CCC and simply put core, memory and power straight to the top. I know yours is a 7950, not 7970, but the theory is still the same. Without increasing this your card will be holding itself back even though you've overclocked it.
 
WuMyster said:
What, would you recommend I do my OCing in the CCC? So allowing more power, will it increase my OCing potential?
Click to expand...

Nah, MSI AB allows you to up the power limit, and it's much more flexible in terms of max overclock. I have my 7950 at 1140/1450 at 1194mV, which in this heat has been hitting high 70s, and has breached 80C at points, so you're doing fine.
 
Right thanks mate.
Looks like i have to do some more testing tomorrow (well today) after setting the power limit to 20%!
Thanks.
 
I'd recommend increasing the power limit, if you do a few runs with out it and a few runs with it enabled you should see a noticeable difference, when I first ran some stability tests I had it disabled and my benchmark results were embarrassing :P the card was throttling itself as it was unable to draw enough power to preform at maximum clocks. Gl and hope to find out your results - btw youve got your card stable at 1150, what sort of clock can you get on your memory?
 
thefogo said:
I believe it lets that card use more power when needed.
Just max it out.
Click to expand...

Lmao...............

Sorry but there's not a chance in hell i would set power to max, the cards aren't ment to use that much power period!

You give the card an unlimited power boost an for sure you'll be buying an new card soon.

Heres a couple of things you've got to think about heat,power spikes,blowing resistors on the pcb.

Even most CPU's on Oc don't have max voltage(power) pumped in them, but hey ho if your after killing your GPU faster then please film it so we can watch the death of a GPU.

If you need to adjust volt then do it in small steps, Oc the card stress test it if its fine leave how it is or if you require more grunt slowly increase again when it becomes unstable start to increase the volt (not to much) gradually
 
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The +power doesnt effect how much voltage gets to the card, just the power (wattage), 1 of my cards has had +20% for a year now and (touch wood) is still going great, amd official page says "

"AMD PowerTune technology helps enable higher performance that is optimized to the thermal limits of the GPU by dynamically adjusting the engine clock during runtime based on an internally calculated GPU power assessment. AMD PowerTune technology also helps to improve the mechanism to deal with applications that would otherwise exceed the GPU’s TDP. By dynamically managing the engine clock speeds based on calculations which determine the proximity of the GPU to its TDP limit, AMD PowerTune allows for the GPU to run within its TDP budget at higher nominal clock speeds than otherwise possible."
 
CyberCrow said:
Lmao...............

Sorry but there's not a chance in hell i would set power to max, the cards aren't ment to use that much power period!

You give the card an unlimited power boost an for sure you'll be buying an new card soon.

Heres a couple of things you've got to think about heat,power spikes,blowing resistors on the pcb.

Even most CPU's on Oc don't have max voltage(power) pumped in them, but hey ho if your after killing your GPU faster then please film it so we can watch the death of a GPU.

If you need to adjust volt then do it in small steps, Oc the card stress test it if its fine leave how it is or if you require more grunt slowly increase again when it becomes unstable start to increase the volt (not to much) gradually
Click to expand...

wait am i missing something here, what is this unlimited power boost you speak about.. you do relize there taking about POWER LIMIT in msi afterburner max is 20%.. they're NOT saying set the core VOLTAGE to max yeah?.
 
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CyberCrow said:
Lmao...............

Sorry but there's not a chance in hell i would set power to max, the cards aren't ment to use that much power period!

You give the card an unlimited power boost an for sure you'll be buying an new card soon.

Heres a couple of things you've got to think about heat,power spikes,blowing resistors on the pcb.

Even most CPU's on Oc don't have max voltage(power) pumped in them, but hey ho if your after killing your GPU faster then please film it so we can watch the death of a GPU.

If you need to adjust volt then do it in small steps, Oc the card stress test it if its fine leave how it is or if you require more grunt slowly increase again when it becomes unstable start to increase the volt (not to much) gradually
Click to expand...

Yeah, it seems as though youre reading it wrong. We're talking about the power slider that is in CCC and MSI AB. It only allows you to add 20% more power for the card to use. We're not talking about the voltage.
 
Max I'll be pushing it will be 1.2v. Thinking of dropping it cause at load, there's quite a bit of coil whine.
Temps are approaching 70C and I'd rather have my fans not have to ramp up as well.
I'll keep you guys posted for anyone interested at what I come out with.
Oh yeah, did a quick heaven 4.0 test and got a 986 score. Decent compared to some other 7950 users on the leaderboard :P
 
You will want to max it to 20%. Otherwise you may find the card downclocking itself when temperatures and voltages seem perfectly fine.
 
Currently have everything stable (I think).
Played BO2 for a few hours and its held up. Will see how BF3 performs. Playing games for me seems to be the best way to test stablility. I can run furmark, kombustor etc. and also loop heaven, 3dmark etc and they wont show any artifacts or crashes. Launch a game and it could crash in seconds.

Ive got it at 1.15V, 1000mhz core clock and 1550 memory clock. Dont seem to be hearing any coil whine after lowering the core clock. Will still have a play around.
 
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