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

[Marine-RX179]

There's something seriously wrong with these cards, advertised as great overclocks they fail to deliver with their low overclocks requiring very high voltages. Take yours as an example, my reference Sapphire 5850 (average, mind you, see the old overclocking thread where some get far better results than me with stock cooling) does 835MHz on core and 1200MHz on memory at its stock 1.087V. Your MSI card requires 15% more volts to do the same! I could bench at 1GHz on core with your voltages

The way I see it is that you can't really compare the Twin FrozR to you reference 5850, as while they both bare the name "5850", I think they are two different breed of animals due to different design.

Instead of keep thinking about how low voltage your reference 5850 can overclock on and trying to overclock using those same voltage, have you actually tried something like 1.2v or higher on overclocking the Twin FrozR?

I pretty much settled on 900/1200 on 1.240v and decided to leave it there.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Don't you see the issue? My MSI card hasn't got any overclocking potential since the voltage controller is borked.

1.095V 775/1125 - can't do
1.100V 775/1125 - can do (stock voltage)
1.105V 775/1125 - can't do

The question is: do I send it as faulty or under DSR?

Sorry, I missed your post at #63. So your problem is with the unofficial overclocking enabled, it will crash no matter what voltage you use?

I haven't actually bothered trying less than 1.200v, as I started with 1.200v and changed the core clock straight to 900MHz, and started my tweaking from there. I haven't use Kombuster to stress test, I only used Heaven Benchmark 2.1 and running BFBC2 for testing stability.

I think I do find weird is that when I first unlock voltage (before editing the cfg file to enable unofficial overclocking), I recall the voltage was at something like 1.164v, but now if I press reset on MSI Afterburner, it takes the voltage down to 1.100v...so that makes me wonder...is the stock voltage actually 1.164v, or 1.100v...?

 

[Marine-RX179]

No, it is with unofficial overclocking disabled. I think I found the issue though, the card overvolts up to 1.164V when leaving it at stock 1.100V. This is seriously wrong, how come you need so much voltage to do 775MHz on core?

When you set anything else but stock it will set at whatever you want. Can you test my theory, e.g. run your card at default voltages and 775/1125 and tell me if Afterburner reports 1.164V?

ok, this is what I done...I pressed reset, and the voltage is at 1.100v, core at 725MHz, memory at 1000MHz. I upped core clock to 775MHz and pressed apply, the voltage is still 1.100v...

Is this what you wanted me to test?

I'm starting to think that it could be possible that the 5850 Twin FrozR default voltage is actually 1.164V rather than 1.100v...

I'm also getting the feeling that the non-reference 5850 in general require higher voltage than the reference 5850, considering majority of the people couldn't clock their non-reference 5850 to beyond 800MHz on stock voltage...

 

[Marine-RX179]

I won't be receiving my card till Thurs and I've never been much into overclocking.
I was planning on giving it a real go once I got this card. Is it really that bad at overclocking? Or have some of you just received faulty/not quite as good overclocking cards?

Well, mine can overclock quite well, but it does require voltage of something like over 1.250v for over 900MHz stable. I think some people are having some problem with the voltage tweak or something...

 

[Marine-RX179]

I'm testing 785/1125 at 1.144V atm. Hopefully I can squeeze a little more juice with reasonable volts out of the card. I'm trying to get the best in terms of temps/noise/volts/clocks. This is how I found a sweetspot with my other 5850 that did 925 MHz on core and 1200 MHz on memory with as little as 1.149V.

Which actually worries you more? Using higher voltage, or the extra heat caused by it?

 

[Marine-RX179]

Krugga what sort of temp you are getting in Heaven Bench at the moment?

 

[Marine-RX179]

wish i got teh hawk GTX460s now

I thought you said you manged to overclock to 875MHz/1250MHz on your card...so what is the problem then (besides you think it slow down)...and was there some problem with the voltage as well?

 

[Marine-RX179]

Does oc'ing using afterburner void warranty? or is it not "like" cpu's and such?

The usual...overclocking the card does void the warranty, but there's no way for them to prove that you've been overclocking the card. Just don't be a honest fool and tell them you've been overclocking the card if you do RMA it back to the manufacturer If you are RMAing back to etailers though, I don't think they cares too much since they would just RMAing it back to the manufacturer for a replacement.

 

[Marine-RX179]

the coolers very good, but the fan speed is 55 at default

Yea...55% is a bit loud when just using the PC for normal use when no gaming...I've set the fanspeed at around 40% at idle, so I won't hear it. I think anything under 50% fanspeed you won't really hear it over the case fans, but 55% fanspeed the noise is definitely noticable.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Please do give me some proven examples of games that benefit from a heavily overclocked CPU at this resolution.

Source games and Black OPs?

Not saying graphic is not important (more important than CPU in most cases), but having heavily overclocked CPU does help quite a bit for games that are not using Quad-cores well.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Core i5 at 3.2GHz with Turbo on (effective 3.36GHz on 4 cores and 3.84GHz on 2 cores) vs Core i5 at 3.6GHz does little to no difference at this resolution.

You have to take CPU arcitecture into consideration as well. In fact you have just proved the point that CPU clock speed is important in Black OPs for people that are not using i5/i7, as Quad-core such as Q6600 at 3.0GHz is only around as fast as i7 920 at 2.0GHz, and Q6600 3.6GHz is only around as fast as i7 920 at 2.6GHz

 

[Marine-RX179]

Hmm my default voltage is 1.1v

When I first unlock the voltage, it was reporting 1.164V...but when I press reset, the voltage is reset to 1.100V.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Meh, pity you can't go lower than 725/1000 for a 2D profile...

Huh? I underclocked the to 540MHz/1000MHz 1.000V...and have no problem using that as 2D profile...

 

[Marine-RX179]

Wait, what? That's not how you do it

Set 725/1000 and standard voltage as your default profile (2d profile) and that will downclock to 157/300 at 950mV in idle.

Set whatever your overclock is as a 3d profile, that will kick in any time you launch a GPU-dependant application.

Side note: be aware that minimizing a game and trying to watch a youtube (flash) video with Hardware Acceleration on will result in an instant driver crash as it's supposed to downclock (or overclock for that matter) to 550/900 or something along these lines. That's a software limitation though.


In other news, my card is unstable with memory at 1150MHz or above. Can MSI 5850 Twin Frozr II owners check their max memory overclocks? Do the tests with core speed and voltage on default, the memory clock is independent. I think all cards use the same memory modules thus finding the max stable ones a good indicator of components quality.

Reference memory usually hits something in between 1200-1250MHz before it crashes/throttles back.

Right right...so I just just use reset and and save that as the 2D profile?
Edited: Got it working now working at 157/300MHz at idle now lol


As for the memory, that for most game 1200MHz memory clock is no problem (I play on TF2, L4D2, Killing Floor etc), but in BFBC2 it doesn't like that memory clock beyond 1100MHz for some odd reason...and it would crash if the memory clock is higher than that...

 

[Marine-RX179]

Great, so you got it working right

TF2/L4D2 - Source games. Not really GPU demanding, are they? Try Crysis or any other graphics hog, you'll immediately notice that it's not BFBC2 issue. These cards have very low quality memory modules it would seem. 4.4Ghz vs 5Ghz on Asus cards isn't impressive. Worse than that, reference MSI cards got better memory modules on them.

Well, while the memory may not clock as well as hoped for, I still think I'm quite happy with the card, considering it only costed £125

If the core clock on the other hand won't go beyond 850MHz, then I would truly be disappointed

 

[Marine-RX179]

Currently I'm working on a lower overclock profile that require lower voltage for less demanding games. So far I managed 835MHz/1250MHz at 1.150v Heaven Benchmark 2.1 six loops no crash, gonna try testing it out in some games later.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Nice, I'm doing mine at 1.21v, 855 MHz on core, stock memory. Dunno if my card is faulty but it's a very poor overclocker (like many other).

I did try 1.150v on 850MHz, but it crashed quite quickly in Heaven...

I'm getting the feeling that once the core clock pass a certain point, it would require much more voltage than the lower end overclock. I know I'm pointing out the obvious for overclocking, but it really does feel that way

 

[Marine-RX179]

Will start attempting to overclock today.
Just wondering, when I unlock voltage in Afterburner it is at 1100, is this my stock voltage? GPU-Z says 1.088 for VDDC which I assume is voltage.
What would be safe starting numbers for me does anyone know?

Ignore the voltage what the GPU-Z tells you...you could try bumping the voltage to 1.150v in MSI Afterburner, and core clock to 835MHz, Memory clock to 1200MHz (p.s. some demanding games don't like the memory clock at higher than 1100MHz). While I can overclock my 5850 to 975MHz core/1100MHz memory clock at 1.265v, but I find that most games in general at 1920 res don't need that much power, so I use 835MHz core/1250MHz memory clock at 1.150v instead for the not-so-demanding games.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Is anyone else finding the default fan speed is about 50% even when the gc is cool? As the fan profile in the bios says it should only get to 50% when about 70c.

I think most of us has the fanspeed stucked at 55% at default...we just use MSI Afterburner to set a custom fanspeed profile to overide the loud 55% fanspeed.

 

[Marine-RX179]

got my card running stable at 850/1250 might try and puss it a little futher though

Save it to a profile in MSI Afterburner, and try higher overclock and save to a different profile.

Currently I have two profiles one at 835MHz and one at 970MHz...for all the dx9 games, and even BFBC2 in dx11 my 835MHz overclock pretty much handle it at ease...I probably won't need the 970MHZ clock speed unless I want to play Crysis, when every single frame rate counts