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***The Official MSI 5850 Twin FrozeR Thread***

Mr Krugga said:
Choose one or more games that you enjoy playing and that are quite GPU demanding. Battlefield Bad Company 2 gets my card hotter than Unigine Heaven for example. Crysis or Metro 2033 would also be good stress testers. GTA IV worked for me well enough when overclocking my reference Sapphire 5850, the game would skip some frames during the gameplay, usually an hour or so within the game. It would occur as clock drops and could be countered by lowering the core/memory clocks by some marginal value, usually 5-10MHz.


1) Download MSI Afterburner 2.0

2) Enable Unofficial Overclocking in .cfg file in Afterburner directory

3) Reset your Catalyst Control Panel settings to factory default

4) Save your default profile to 1 and then as 2d profile in Afterburner settings

5) Ramp up your memory clocks to 1100 MHz, apply and save as the second profile, 3d profile in Afterburner settings.

6) Test in game, if stable, go further by 25 MHz, leave your core clock/voltage at default yet. You will probably find the memory being unstable at 1200 MHz or earlier.

7) With your max stable memory do some Unigine Heaven benchmarks, note down the scores of the second run each time you do them. Clock memory down by 10-15 MHz, note the score of the second run in Heaven, compare the scores. See which setting gives you the best score. Double check, save the profile in Afterburner and then in settings as 3d profile.

8) Start overclocking the core, 15 MHz increases until you find instability. Up to you how much voltage you're willing to apply, I usually save a few profiles, one for stock max clocks, one for mild voltage overclock and another one for max overclock. You have to find the sweetspot for your card/your needs.

9) Use the memory overclock from your previous tests and see if it's stable with the max core overclock. I usually do 3 runs of Heaven and 2 hours of BFBC2/Crysis gameplay to decide whether it's stable or not.
Click to expand...

Sorry for the late reply.

Thanks for the break down. Im gona gona give it a bash now. Il post back to see if there was any improvement :o
 
I'm struggling to get Windows Experience Index to run. I have got various overclocks stable in Vantage and Heaven, but with ANY overclock applied WEI fails at the Media Encoding section. Tried all sorts to fix it but to no avail.

Anyone else had this?
 
Mine is running far too hot, idle it's around 45c but 95c when playing l4d2/bc2. With case temps around 35c, I don't understand why it is running so hot at stock speeds anyone got any ideas?.
 
Ace said:
Mine is running far too hot, idle it's around 45c but 95c when playing l4d2/bc2. With case temps around 35c, I don't understand why it is running so hot at stock speeds anyone got any ideas?.
Click to expand...

Are the fans on the GFX card running at all. I'm only getting max temps in the 60's with my Crossfire set up. This is with the top card and no space between this and the bottom card.
 
I've checked both fans are working, setting them manually to 100% with the side of the case off and loading up a game still has the card up to 90-95c within 1 minute of playing.

Making games unplayable as the card throttles at around 95c. Since I had no heat problems with my old card in the same case it looks like the card is faulty. :(
 
Sounds like it is incorrectly seated? Do you get high temps playing hardware accelerated media content (VC-1, h264)?

On another note, i think 1150 is the highest i can do on RAM. Similar to most other folk on this thread.
 
Temps stay low when playing 264 videos, just seems to be games that are the problem. I don't really want to touch the heatsink, I am hoping ocuk will replace/repair it for me.
 
Another check here re stress testing. Just left Heaven running for 3 hours and have come home to a crash. Was trying 875/1050 @ 1.250v.

Have I just got a bad overclocker? Temps no higher than 55 degrees (in Silverstone RV02).

How long do people stress test in Heaven for before they're happy that an OC is stable?
 
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Well, fingers crossed I'm okay now. Windows 2D temps are 28 degrees at stock clocks, 1.100v - happy with that. Have settled on 875/1000 for my OC at 1.264v - I seem to be having trouble when I mess with the memory. Maybe look at it again in a bit. Have run a few hours of Heaven, 4 runs of 3DMark Vantage and 3 runs of 3DMark 11.

3DMark Vantage GPU score was ~P10,500 with my overclocked 4870, now getting ~P17,500 GPU score with the 5850. £125 well spent methinks :D
 
Ty for the tips in this thread, current clocks are 2d std & 3d 800/1100. My main pain was the fan noise but I now ( thanks to this thread ) have that controlled by afterburner.
 
Got one of these while they were on offer but have got a little bit more money than i expected so iam going to xfire them but would i be okay to do this with a http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-117-AN.

Havent got the full system built yet as im still waiting for SB but it will be powering

I5 2500k OCd
1 spinpoint f3
DVD drive
Xfire 5850

Oh and also do most motherboards come with Xfire bridges as these dont have any?
 
I'm using afterburner to control the ridiculous default fan speeds, and noticing something strange going on.

My GPU2 usage and clock speeds keep jumping into 3D. It happens after exiting certain games but today it happened from a clean boot whilst I was browsing within Steam. GPU2 is running a 775 Core showing 99% usage. Nothing seems to reset this other than a reboot. I had originally thought it was just certain games that were causing it (Cricket Revolution which is OGL and Oblivion), but it seems as though it can just happen from the desktop.

I dont think its a faulty card as I have swapped them and its always GPU2 that speeds up (the one in the x16 slot with the monitor connected to it). Does anybody have any thoughts?

Add to the fact that it took me 2 hours to even get the drivers to install and the machine to recognise that I have xfire and it looks like dual GPU solutions havent moved on much since the old Geforce 2 SLI a decade ago...

EDIT: I have done the EnableULPS registry hack and it also appears that once this clockspeed switch happens, xfire is dead until a reboot...
 
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Balb0wa - so are you saying you managed to change the 3D voltages in your bios or not?

Would be great to be able to do this rather than fiddle with afterburner all the time...

Has anyone else modded their bios yet??
 
BS Dave said:
Balb0wa - so are you saying you managed to change the 3D voltages in your bios or not?

Would be great to be able to do this rather than fiddle with afterburner all the time...

Has anyone else modded their bios yet??
Click to expand...

No couldnt raise the voltage
 
jmp_78 said:
Another check here re stress testing. Just left Heaven running for 3 hours and have come home to a crash. Was trying 875/1050 @ 1.250v.

Have I just got a bad overclocker? Temps no higher than 55 degrees (in Silverstone RV02).

How long do people stress test in Heaven for before they're happy that an OC is stable?
Click to expand...
I wouldn't worry about running benchmarks for silly amounts of time because it means nothing. Some games will run perfectly with a certain overclock for hours but others won't run for more than a couple of minutes because they all make different demands on the card. Using Heaven just means the card can run that at a certain speed.

Example I've found Company of Heroes can be very demanding on the shaders on nVidia cards. I need to downclock over 100mhz for that game compared to all my other games.
 
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