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FEATURED HD7970 & HD7950 Results Thread - Torture Your Card, Post It Here!

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Good point.
Just submitted my first Heaven score...had some artifacting at 1275x1675 so starting over at the bottom and working up.

Nice points for the Heaven score!

Run the other benchmarks (for some good 'ol boints) and send a PM to Nzaneb, Brolloks, and Bobnova to get access to the Benching Team badge and our Team section :)
 
[QUOTE codeman05

I must be missing something...
I've flashed to the "unlocked" bios, and I'm still capping at 1125...
Both cards seem to have flashed, as I now get: "This version of VBIOS is already installed" when I try again.
hummmm...

[edit 2]
Success! Had to switch back to afterburner for some reason...:confused:[/QUOTE]

I had same problem asus didnt work or msi had to alter cfg file all good now
changed 0 to 1

msi.jpg
 
I've flashed to the "unlocked" bios, and I'm still capping at 1125...

Hi Codeman - I was wondering what BIOS you flashed to - the ASUS? Or is there a Sapphire BIOS floating around somewhere that unlocks voltage control?

I have the Sapphire 7970 also and I've been trying to use the latest Sapphire Trixx to bump up the voltage but GPU-z is flatlining at 1.17. I assume that means I need to flash the card, right?

I'm running a bunch of tests for iRacing in comparison to the 6970. At 1125/1575 it is already about 40% faster there in triple-screen Eyefinity so I can't wait to see what else I can drag out of it. I appreciate your help!
 
Hi Codeman - I was wondering what BIOS you flashed to - the ASUS? Or is there a Sapphire BIOS floating around somewhere that unlocks voltage control?

I have the Sapphire 7970 also and I've been trying to use the latest Sapphire Trixx to bump up the voltage but GPU-z is flatlining at 1.17. I assume that means I need to flash the card, right?

I'm running a bunch of tests for iRacing in comparison to the 6970. At 1125/1575 it is already about 40% faster there in triple-screen Eyefinity so I can't wait to see what else I can drag out of it. I appreciate your help!

Hey OC, yes you do need to flash. I used the Asus bios and it worked perfectly.
Afterwards I was able to use Trixx or MSI Afterburner (Beta 10), to get 1125+ clocks.
 
Codeman - one other question if you don't mind. Does GPU-z report the increased voltage after you flashed the card? I saw some comments over on overclock.net that said you did not need to flash the bios when using Sapphire Trixx but that GPU-z may need to be updated before it reports the increased voltage.

In other news, I have been testing a core overclock at stock voltage and it looks like 1140MHz is stable for my card :D
 
Here are some of my results
12251550.jpg
 
Codeman - one other question if you don't mind. Does GPU-z report the increased voltage after you flashed the card? I saw some comments over on overclock.net that said you did not need to flash the bios when using Sapphire Trixx but that GPU-z may need to be updated before it reports the increased voltage.

In other news, I have been testing a core overclock at stock voltage and it looks like 1140MHz is stable for my card :D

Honestly I didn't try Trixx until after I flashed, so that may be true that you don't need to flash.
 
Honestly I didn't try Trixx until after I flashed, so that may be true that you don't need to flash.

Fair enough. I wasn't getting anywhere with increased voltage before flashing so I flashed to the ASUS bios last night and tried again. Same results unfortunately. From other comments elsewhere it's looking like this card really likes to be kept cool. That fits with my results also - at higher clocks on stock voltage, such as 1170 I was only getting artifacts after the GPU reached about 74 degrees. The higher the clock, the lower the temp where problems start to arise.

I came back to my machine this morning to run some more tests with fan on full but I hit a problem. Yesterday gputool was giving me around 485 fps at 1140MHz during stability testing, this morning I was getting ~200!! I hope I haven't killed the card :( I killed every gputool test run as soon as artifacts showed up though so I'm hoping it's just a software issue. Cleaning and reinstalling the drivers did not help so I'm reinstalling my whole system right now. Fingers crossed......
 
Why use a tool like Furmark/GPUTool to put an artificially heavy heat load on it that won't be replicated by even high-end benchmarks?
 
Oced 7970 as far as the AMD overdrive will allow. I only tested the oc by running Vantage and it seemed fine. I am curious if this will be ok for 24/7 use.


7970m.jpg
[/URL]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us[/IMG]
 
As long as it's stable and assuming there are decent temps, without any voltage increase you should be fine 24/7 no problem.
 
As long as it's stable and assuming there are decent temps, without any voltage increase you should be fine 24/7 no problem.

Stupid question, but moving the slider all the way over to 20% in AMD overdrive is not upping the voltage is it?
 
No, it's enabling the card to reach its max TDP without throttling. It won't hurt anything (again, as long as temperatures aren't skyrocketing ...and without voltage they shouldn't be unless something is wrong).
 
Why use a tool like Furmark/GPUTool to put an artificially heavy heat load on it that won't be replicated by even high-end benchmarks?

Well in my case I'm using the card to drive iRacing with unlimited fps over triple screens, so in practice my GPU is typically pegged at 100%. Something like gputool is not unrealistic as a test against that usage. In general though I agree that you need not necessarily be 100% stable in something like gputool for everyday settings but it does depend on your usage.

Fortunately it turns out I did not do any damage to the card last night. Looks like whatever issue caused my collapse in gputool fps was software related. I reinstalled my system and drivers and all is well again. Looks like this GPU is particularly heat-sensitive. I cranked the GPU fan to 100% and I'm now looking stable at 1175MHz on stock voltage :D It's just 8mins into a gputool stability test though so time will tell. It looks to have stabilized at 64*C at 100% fan. Can't wait to get better cooling on this card. I'm a little nervous about water-cooling (I might just be clumsy enough to be THAT guy who spills fluid all over his motherboard etc :) ) but it looks like Arctic are launching a very promising air-cooler for this card :

http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/detail/index/sArticle/502/sCategory/2182

Update: 30 mins stable in gputool at 1175/6000 stock voltage. Fan at 100% 64*C :)
 
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I may or may not have just received an XFX Black Edition 7970 even though I've been talking about what a bad idea it would be for me to buy one.
 
I only scored 423 in Heaven.

but that was bone stock CPU and Vid Card speeds while running at 2560x1600 with everything turned up as high as I could on the old version 2.1 client.

Ooops.

Will re-run tonight
 
I only scored 423 in Heaven.

but that was bone stock CPU and Vid Card speeds while running at 2560x1600 with everything turned up as high as I could on the old version 2.1 client.

Ooops.

Will re-run tonight
:shock:
I vote you run the HwBot DX11 version and work on joining the benchmarking team :)

I believe it runs at 1920x1080 with the pre-set HWBot version.
 
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