Radeon 7970 overclock.

[ALXAndy]

Hey all.

Basically I mentioned in another thread that I was unable to get my card to do anything more than 1000mhz on stock volts.

I suspected it could be down to the old version of Afterburner I was using, so I tried to unlock the voltage and sure enough it refused.

However, I then went and found Afterburner 2.2 Beta 14, and unlocked the voltage. What I have found though has only confused me.

I Googled for "Radeon 7970 stock voltage" and for everything I have found and read it says that the stock voltage of a 7970 is 1.1v. However, when I open Afterburner it tells me my card is @ 1049mv

Is this correct? because obviously 1049mv is 1.05v or there abouts and that's half a mv less than every other Radeon.

If this is wrong (well, right, the voltage I mean) it could explain why my overclock yields are so poor.

I do know that the bios says Pine Group XFX, so it could literally be their bummy bios.

Help appreciated ! I will continue to look into this

 

[Mr. May]

Get msi afterburner ramp up the volts and the clock's.

 

[ALXAndy]

Yeah I understand I can do that I just wanted to know if it was right.

I downloaded a new bios and tried to put it onto bios 2 by moving the switch (before I booted of course). However, I am getting a subsystem mismatch error in winflash. So I tried an Asus bios, XFX bios (my card is XFX) and still getting the same.

I wanted to flash a different bios onto position 2 so I could find out if the voltage stayed the same.

 

[ALXAndy]

Man XFX suck. It would seem that my card's bios was undervolted, hence why it overclocked like crap.

Put the voltage to 1100mv which is apparently what Asus use, quelle surprise.

Not bad for a I7 950 stock.

 

[Paracelsus]

IIRC they don't have one stock voltage, can be different per card.

So actually with a stock voltage of 1.05 instead of 1.1 you got a better card which only needs 1.05 to hit stock clocks, again IIRC

 

[ALXAndy]

Yeah could be ! I got 1000mhz perfectly fine on the 1050mv.

Will try and find the AB later that allows more overclocking room

 

[Menty]

My PCS+ 7950 was the same, it had a lower core voltage than other 7950 versions at default.
Suppose it runs cooler at stock though and does not need much extra voltage to give a healthy OC anyway.

 

[Gregster]

Man XFX suck. It would seem that my card's bios was undervolted, hence why it overclocked like ****.

Put the voltage to 1100mv which is apparently what Asus use, quelle surprise.

Not bad for a I7 950 stock.

Not a bad score at all

 

[chipachap]

@ALXAndy. All 7970's have different ASIC quality's which is the leakage on the chip, you can check this with the latest GPU-Z. The higher the ASIC means the chip has lower leakage which means it doesn't need as many volts as a low ASIC/high leakage card.

This is why your card has 1.049mv, one of mine is the same and the other is 1174mv standard. my 1.049mv one has 92% ASIC i think so yours will probably be from 85% and above. My card with 1174mv has 68% ASIC which means it has high leakage.

In terms of overclocking from what I gathered online the HIGHER the stock voltage the better it can OC on air but I think all cards are locked to +125mv instead of them all being limited to 1.3v incase people melt the chip. This also means the LOWER the stock voltage it will OC better on water. Obviously it all depends on the individual chip aswell but this is also a factor.

My 1174mv one OC's better than the 1.049mv one but i suspect if I unlocked the bios to allow to go higher than 125mv it would OC better than the 1174 which would already be nearer to the 1.3v we know is 'maximum' so to speak.

EDIT: There is 1.025 1.049. 1.112, 1.174. They're actually all in the Afterburner settings.