• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Unable to overclock 7970 DCU-II

Associate
Joined
4 Feb 2011
Posts
45
Hey all, built my new PC the other day with a 3570k, 16gb ram and the Asus 7970 and thought I'd try and squeeze a little more performance out of the card. It runs fine at the 925mhz stock clock (although the heaven benchmark with the ocuk recommended settings only scores in the 1400's, is that a little low?), and yet I am completely unable to raise the core clock even slightly without the benchmark crashing after a couple of minutes.

I've tried several oc programmes including afterburner and gpu tweak and I'm also unable to adjust the voltage. I've looked around and the voltage being set in stone seems to be a common complaint as well. Even at stock voltage though, people seem to be getting 1100mhz stable easily whereas mine will lock up even below 1000. Am I being a moron and doing something wrong, or does it look like I might have a duff card?

Cheers all.
 
does it look like I might have a duff card?

If it runs @stock fine, then it's not a duff card.;)

It very well may be duff @overclocking though.

Is your system oc stable?

There could be a weak link in the system being unstable oc'ed that's causing the crashing rather than the 7970.

Running the rest of your system@stock and then trying to oc the 7970 will tell you whether it's a duff clocker or not and give you a better idea of what clocks can be achieved on the 7970.

If it improves, then you need to go back to oc'ing the rest of the system for stability.
 
Rest of the system is completely stock right now and yeah the power control is at +20%. The temps are fine too, the gpu is currently idling at 30c and goes to about 60 under load with ~20-25% fan.

I've seen a bunch of conflicting reports about heaven scores, is the 1400's alright for a stock 7970@1080p? As I suppose a low score there could point to something else being wrong.

Kind of gutted if it's just a chip that wont overclock when I could have spent half the amount on a 7850 and clocked it up to the same sort of performance.
 
Hey dude, i have the same card and had the same problem. The voltage is locked on that bios. Was realllly dissapointed because that card should overclock loads.

I thought about trying to flash it with a different bios, maybe the DCU II TOP version. I also sent Asus a few mails about it but they never got back to me. Because I was kinda annoyed with the whole thing I ordered a 670 windforce instead and will be sending the 7970 back.

The 670 has actually benchmarked higher on everything so far and I feel a bit better about it. It think thats mainly because of the turbo boost and the fact the 670 has a bit more room for overclocking. Highest stable I got on the 7970 was 1150Mhz with the max voltage 1188mV. BF3 seems to run smoother with the nvidia drivers and I hear D3 works better with nvidia also.

7970 might work better at higher resolutions or with multiple screens though (I play at 1920x1080). But it sounds like you have a bad overclocker as well :(
 
Hey dude, i have the same card and had the same problem. The voltage is locked on that bios. Was realllly dissapointed because that card should overclock loads.

I thought about trying to flash it with a different bios, maybe the DCU II TOP version. I also sent Asus a few mails about it but they never got back to me. Because I was kinda annoyed with the whole thing I ordered a 670 windforce instead and will be sending the 7970 back.

The 670 has actually benchmarked higher on everything so far and I feel a bit better about it. It think thats mainly because of the turbo boost and the fact the 670 has a bit more room for overclocking. Highest stable I got on the 7970 was 1150Mhz with the max voltage 1188mV. BF3 seems to run smoother with the nvidia drivers and I hear D3 works better with nvidia also.

7970 might work better at higher resolutions or with multiple screens though (I play at 1920x1080). But it sounds like you have a bad overclocker as well :(

Honestly I'd be happy with 1150mhz as I'm not looking for a huge overclock or anything, but when I cant even get 1000mhz without a crash it just seems like something is wrong.

I'm well inside my 2 week return window so I'm considering doing the same thing to be honest, but I just don't want to be without a gpu for the diablo release :(
 
I've seen a bunch of conflicting reports about heaven scores, is the 1400's alright for a stock 7970@1080p? As I suppose a low score there could point to something else being wrong.

Try running the benchmark with the settings in this thread: ***Official Unigine Heaven DX11 3.0 Benchmark Scores***

Note it's Heaven 3.0 and make sure to use the same settings as everyone else.

Biffa scored 1671 points at 1920x1080 with a stock speed HD 7970.
 
Honestly I'd be happy with 1150mhz as I'm not looking for a huge overclock or anything, but when I cant even get 1000mhz without a crash it just seems like something is wrong.

I'm well inside my 2 week return window so I'm considering doing the same thing to be honest, but I just don't want to be without a gpu for the diablo release :(

Well if you can afford it (i had to use a credit card) you can order a new card now then send yours back and wait for the money. Guess it can take several weeks for the refund ? But that way you will have the new card next day.

Also if you check out the forums and stuff it seems like there have been problems with D3 and latest ATI drivers. So unless you really like ATI for another reason it might be worth looking at the nvidia cards. 670 GTX is slightly cheaper across the board but the same price you can get the windforce version.
 
Try running the benchmark with the settings in this thread: ***Official Unigine Heaven DX11 3.0 Benchmark Scores***

Note it's Heaven 3.0 and make sure to use the same settings as everyone else.

Biffa scored 1671 points at 1920x1080 with a stock speed HD 7970.

Yeah those are the settings I use, last score was in the high 1400's so there's a bit of a difference there.

edit: just had a hard crash while playing a game on stock clocks now. Maybe there is something wrong with the card :/

edit2: power control was still at +20%, could that have caused it? put it back down to 0 and the crashes seem to have stopped and oddly by heaven bench was 1680. I'm confused. My last card was a gtx470 and I seem to remember just whacking the sliders up on that and everything being peachy.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom