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- Joined
- 18 Aug 2011
- Posts
- 17
I brought a new r9 280x recently as an upgrade to 2x HD7870's in Crossfire (if you can call that an upgrade) and long story short the sodding thing is proving a bitch to overlclock past stock voltages. I have a reasonable amount of overclocking experience now, going through at least 3 generations of Amd cards my self and overclocking multipul different cards for friends.
Here is the list of things I am using:-
My goals or ideal overclock for this card would be something like the following:
Core Clock 1175-1200 Mhz
Memory Clock 1675-1700 Mhz
Core Voltage 1.3v
For comparison stock is:
The first problem I am having with this card is getting the Core Voltage to actually get to and stay at 1.3V. Asus's GPU tweak manages to get it to about 1.25V, which I am reading in Asus Tweak's monitor thing and in GPU-z. I managed to get about 1.285 when using MSI Afterburner and setting voltage to be forced constant, however as the temperatures rise, the VDDC keeps dropping as far as 1.22V. I also tried 1.550V on the Memory as well, however none of these seem to be very stable and jump anywhere from their stock setting, halfway to the Voltages I set. I am trying these voltages at clock speeds of 1150Mhz on Core and 1625Mhz on Memory.
The second problem, which is related to the first one is that the auto fan curve is the most stupid thing in the world, not even budging past 40% fan speed at 85 Degrees Celsius. My guess is this problem is being caused by the VBIOS or Driver, but I'm not 100% sure.
The way these problems are related is with throttling, if I set and relative high OC and leave the fan at auto, the Voltages will start relatively close to what I set them to be, as the card gets hotter (Testing in Furmark and Unigine Valley, to ensure no BSOD when gaming), artefacts start to appear then eventually a the black lines of death, everything else on the PC is running the the graphics are ****ed, so I have to turn the PC off at the case.
The magic temperature that is appears to crash at every time is about 70-75 degrees, with heavy voltage drop down to as far as 1.18V sometimes at about 72 degrees. I have tried manual fan settings as the default ones are so ridiculous with quite an agressive fan curve to no avail. The VDDC just keeps dropping as the temperature increases.
The way I see what is happening is that the card is throttling itself, reducing voltage to reduce the temperature, therefore making the clock speeds unsustainable. (IT IS DEFINITELY NOT A POWER PROBLEM AS THE CARD HAS A 1000W POWER SUPPLY ALL TO ITS SELF.)
The only solutions I see are to set the Core Voltage at a constant 1.3V in the VBIOS somehow or to try different VBIOS versions and versions of Catalyst. Otherwise I could try and get Amazon to send me a replacement and try that out.
I don't really know where to start and would greatly appreciate some advice
Here is the list of things I am using:-
- Asus Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP
- VBIOS 015.041.000.000.000000
- Catalyst 14.4 RC1 (Driver Packaging Version 14.10.1006-140417a-171099C)
- Catalyst 14.7 RC1 Beta
My goals or ideal overclock for this card would be something like the following:
Core Clock 1175-1200 Mhz
Memory Clock 1675-1700 Mhz
Core Voltage 1.3v
For comparison stock is:
- Core Clock 1070 Mhz
- Memory Clock 1600 Mhz
- Core Voltage 1.2v
The first problem I am having with this card is getting the Core Voltage to actually get to and stay at 1.3V. Asus's GPU tweak manages to get it to about 1.25V, which I am reading in Asus Tweak's monitor thing and in GPU-z. I managed to get about 1.285 when using MSI Afterburner and setting voltage to be forced constant, however as the temperatures rise, the VDDC keeps dropping as far as 1.22V. I also tried 1.550V on the Memory as well, however none of these seem to be very stable and jump anywhere from their stock setting, halfway to the Voltages I set. I am trying these voltages at clock speeds of 1150Mhz on Core and 1625Mhz on Memory.
The second problem, which is related to the first one is that the auto fan curve is the most stupid thing in the world, not even budging past 40% fan speed at 85 Degrees Celsius. My guess is this problem is being caused by the VBIOS or Driver, but I'm not 100% sure.
The way these problems are related is with throttling, if I set and relative high OC and leave the fan at auto, the Voltages will start relatively close to what I set them to be, as the card gets hotter (Testing in Furmark and Unigine Valley, to ensure no BSOD when gaming), artefacts start to appear then eventually a the black lines of death, everything else on the PC is running the the graphics are ****ed, so I have to turn the PC off at the case.
The magic temperature that is appears to crash at every time is about 70-75 degrees, with heavy voltage drop down to as far as 1.18V sometimes at about 72 degrees. I have tried manual fan settings as the default ones are so ridiculous with quite an agressive fan curve to no avail. The VDDC just keeps dropping as the temperature increases.
The way I see what is happening is that the card is throttling itself, reducing voltage to reduce the temperature, therefore making the clock speeds unsustainable. (IT IS DEFINITELY NOT A POWER PROBLEM AS THE CARD HAS A 1000W POWER SUPPLY ALL TO ITS SELF.)
The only solutions I see are to set the Core Voltage at a constant 1.3V in the VBIOS somehow or to try different VBIOS versions and versions of Catalyst. Otherwise I could try and get Amazon to send me a replacement and try that out.
I don't really know where to start and would greatly appreciate some advice