OC'ing Sapphire HD6870 w/Trixx (NooB)

I just installed a 6870 and also got the Trixx utility. Basically I have a middle of the road set up a pre-built HP w/FX-6120 6core @6GB Ram 1TB HHD and fairly vanilla from that point on. No crossfire capability. All that said I was wondering if there is a optimum setting to put the Trixx to. Tinkering I moved the sliders to the right hit apply and it immediately gave me a black screen so that obviously doesn't work too well. Being a NooB my question is does tweaking the speeds really help in the long run for short periods of time and we're talkin' gaming here. Think BF3 and Rise of Flight sorts that like a lot of GFX action. From what I have gleaned on youtube and some forums it seems the settings are hit and miss keeping an eye on gpu temps with FurMark or Speccy but my question is more geared to getting a tad better umph so to speak without really burning the thing up if you get my meaning. Do I gain anything from bumping up the settings a tad over stock settings and is it worth it?

I highly recommend you get MSI Afterburner (and don't forget to install Kombustor) and ditch TrixXx since is really bad IMHO.
I use MSI Afterburner for mine, currently OC'ed @ 975/1175MHz without touching the voltages (since when I do that with TrixXx it prevents the cards from lowering the voltage and clock at idle). Enable the OSD on Afterburner and you can see all the information you would like to monitor while in-game.
If your card gets higher then, lets say 65C with the auto-fan profile, simply create a "user defined" profile for it.

¡Hope it helps, good luck!

OCing HD6870 Sapphire

Thanks Tiki...I did download the MSI or both rather and ran tests and then bumped it as per your numbers 975/1175 and left the voltage alone on both tests and not sure if I saw a gain or not but I did raise the fan from 21% auto mode to 50% and the temps dropped by 13*C so that was an improvement for sure. Funny thing is when I tried FurMark and I did the v1.85 & the v1.10.1 the only one that would work was the older version and then only in stock mode all other settings did weird things to my machine..using Trixx that is...ergo the thread. The newer version of FM just gave me a black screen and the older one when I bumped the settings a little split my screen in half and the third one v1.95 I believe it was gave me nice green vertical lines on the monitor and the only way out was to hold the on/off button down and reboot each time on all three versions...scary to say the least. Got any ideas on whats up with that?

The green vertical lines are artefacting. It means your overclock on your 6870 is unstable and your drivers have crashed. I'm assuming you're getting these results when you're running the programs to test your GPU?

That is correct when I was using FurMark to ''run in'' that is the result I had and I tried it three different ways with the three versions (v1.10.1-v1.95-v1.85) and it was either black screen or green screen w/vertical lines or split screen with a black overlay w/vertical and horizontal bars. I was wondering why the drivers crashed when my settings where within parameters shown for this gpu. I have a single gfx setup and only one pci-e card slot so therefore unable to crossfire another gfx and and bumping my settings from 900/1050 to 975/1175 leaving the voltages at 1.175v and changing the fan from auto 21% to non-auto 50% did drop the temps down by 13 (was 73*C to 60*C) during a stress test and my fps didn't really jump any real noticable amount. It could be the cpu (AMD FX-6120 6 core 3.5Ghz) but am not sure. So the deal about squeezing more out of these things by increasing the numbers doesn't seem in my case to really do to much. Like I was telling Tiki I did use the Afterburner and MSI Kombuster to see if it made any real differences from the Trixx utility but found none that made any noticeable changes. And being a NooB I am not real comfortable getting in there and changing things that could harm the unit trying to squeeze the maximum out of it when it seems that it is really not making any big differences. The Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 is a decent unit as is and in stock mode does well with most games.

I was under the impression that OC'ing would inhance the output but have yet to see it. Actually I got more frame rates in the stock settings. So as you can see I am trying to see what the advantages are. I am sure it helps some people in their set up or it wouldn't be so popular a thing to do but it really has me scratching my head. Thanks for letting me ramble on about this.

Yeah, those are artefacts, hence the OC failed.
Make sure you remove TrixXx from running at startup and applying any chances and also disable "AMD OverDrive" on your Catalyst control panel, just to be sure nothing is trying to override your Afterburner settings.

Since the OC I have didn't worked on your GPU, try setting it to 950/1075 and give it the "1080 preset" in Furmark.

This is the FurMark score without OC:


This is FurMark score with OC:


So there is a small improvement, but then again this is a benchmark not a real game.

Well done Tiki. I got almost the exact results. One thing I have learned is if indeed I need to tweak a game setting atleast now I know the parameters to deal with. And basically that is what my query is all about. Kombuster and FurMark are a lot alike. I noticed in Afterburner and Trixx that my slide bars in both where at about 75% in stock settings so in my case I am almost at the threshold of tweaking ability and will stick with the 975/1175 if and when I do decide to ramp it up a bit. Thanks for your help and clarity. Might as well chalk this one up as RESOLVED. thanks bud.

btw my native resolution on the Samsung 26'' is 1360x768 a rather odd size.

I just ran another test and it crashed in both Kombuster and Furmark reset the parameters to 950/1100 and got a score of 2998 w/49 fps on FurMark v1.10.1 so that seems to be the ' sweet spot ' for my set up. Thanks again I would have never known how to go about doing this stuff without your help...hats off. :>}

I have a very similar "issue". I'm using a 32' Phillips LCD TV that can only go to 1360x768 albeit it supports "Full HD".

I'm glad I could help you out!

yeah if I go to any other setting besides 720 all kinds of weird s**t happens. I tried the other one and it crashed the 'puter. And my lcd flat screen says it can handle full hd too and to be honest bluray looks good but my pc says the native is 1360x768 like yours does and it doesn't like any other settings...trust me I tried 'em and even more weirdness happened so no more messing with that setting for sure.