• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

7950 OC advice

N

N0fe

n00b
Joined
Dec 22, 2012
Messages
5
Hey all. Before I begin, I'd like to say that I have very little experience with OC.

My system that I assembled recently:

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
Antec M HCG-620 W PSU
i5 3570k stock
CM 212 EVO for cooling
Gigabyte 7950 windforce factory OC to 900mhz
Windows 7 64 bit

My driver has been crashing nonstop. It's not a hard crash, I can always alt tab out or it recovers to desktop. I get slight artifacts in WoW, like quick flickers or stretchy shadows for a split second. I also got a few flashing models during the Unigen test.

I was playing Sleeping dogs today, a game that I'm not exactly pleased with, given the inconsistent performance on my PC. The game has frequent slowdowns that really take me out of the action.

My regular temps for the 7950 are 55-57C under full load. This was at the factory OC setting. I tried to change drivers around, going from 12.11 betas and 12.10. None of it worked so I used AMD overdrive to return the clocks to stock levels. This seemed to fix it as I got past a part in Sleeping dogs that consistently crashed the driver. Disabling AMD overdrive didn't stop the crashes.

I was also getting these crashes in the Witcher 2, as well as black ops 2, I just wasn't aware and though they were game bugs.

Can anyone with experience point out the problem here? I was going to flash my BIOS, I have a formatted USB drive for Q-flash but I'm waiting to pull the trigger. Is my video card defective? I'm no expert but I would guess it is just getting incorrect voltage. AMD overdrive's voltage option is garbage and means nothing to me so I would like some advice on how to properly overclock the card. I wouldn't expect a factory overclocked card to have these problems with a motherboard from the same manufacturer, but here I am.

Any help is appreciated.

Edit: Forgot to add

Mobo rev. is F8 and the voltage to the CPU and card are set to auto I believe.
 
I guess my question is. Did you overclock the card to 900mhz? Or did the card come shipped at 900mhz, and its not stable at the 900mhz clock speeds?
 
DASHlT said:
I guess my question is. Did you overclock the card to 900mhz? Or did the card come shipped at 900mhz, and its not stable at the 900mhz clock speeds?
Click to expand...

Yes, it's factory OC to 900mhz. And the driver constantly crashes unless I downclock it to stock 7950 800mhz clocks with AMD overdrive.

I hope all the info is there because I'm going to sleep. Hard day of obsessing over this crap.
 
N0fe said:
Yes, it's factory OC to 900mhz. And the driver constantly crashes unless I downclock it to stock 7950 800mhz clocks with AMD overdrive.

I hope all the info is there because I'm going to sleep. Hard day of obsessing over this crap.
Click to expand...

Hmm sounds to me like the card is FUBAR then. Specially if you have to downclock it to get it stable.

1 thing you can do is up the voltage of the card to get it stable at 900mhz, but when you buy a factory overclocked card, it should work right out of the box.

I would send it back and get a new card (if you plan to get a refund DO NOT USE THE 3 free game codes you get, otherwise they will charge you $150 off the purchase of the card).
 
looke like your card is faulty. get a new replacement. if you want a full refund make sure you don't use the game coupons .
 
I vote with the rest of the group that you need to RMA the card or return for a replacement if your build is that recent.

If you are stable in windows, but only crash during gaming then the GPU is usually your issue.
 
Thanks guys, I'm going to take it into my shop which offers spot replacement. I hope I can get them to duplicate the issue otherwise I'm stuck without a card for the holidays.

Update: They won't give me direct replacement, so it looks like I have to go through gigabyte. I know it might be a real issue to do it Christmas week so ill wait. In the meantime I've sent a question to support and I'll see what they have to say.
 
Last edited:
Oh, I should also mention that I've done a full memtest for this card overnight and it came back with no problems, if that matters.
 
When you say "crash," what exactly is happening? Hard screen freeze and you have to reboot the computer? Repeated recovery/crash cycle? BSOD? As long as you're waiting, load up MSI Afterburner and check what stock settings are at (clocks, voltages, etc.). If your voltage is really low, you could apply a change while you wait so you can still game. Also make sure your Windows install is correct, all drivers (especially chipset) are installed, your in-game/load temps for GPU and VRM's are good (check with HWiNFO64), etc.
 
Mr. K6 said:
When you say "crash," what exactly is happening? Hard screen freeze and you have to reboot the computer? Repeated recovery/crash cycle? BSOD? As long as you're waiting, load up MSI Afterburner and check what stock settings are at (clocks, voltages, etc.). If your voltage is really low, you could apply a change while you wait so you can still game. Also make sure your Windows install is correct, all drivers (especially chipset) are installed, your in-game/load temps for GPU and VRM's are good (check with HWiNFO64), etc.
Click to expand...

The crash is pretty mild. The game will freeze for a few seconds. There are no graphical artifacts during this freeze, just a still frame. The game sound completely stops as well, but sound from skype and other sources continues... Some games will be automatically minimized for a "your driver has recovered" notification from catalyst control center. Other games I have to ctrl+alt+delete out of but it's never a hard computer crash or BSOD. I don't know if this matters but skype and windows live messenger windows are all black until I restart the programs after driver crashes.

I'll update this once i get the MSI afterburner readings. I'm using ATI overdrive to downclock the card right now but ill let it go back to stock settings to test.

Edit: One more thing, I could reproduce the crash at will by playing a Sleeping dogs mission through. During the wedding mission, going through a set of doors and disarming a thug would crash the driver every time. I don't know what this could mean, perhaps you guys would.

Edit 2: Running Unigen heaven dx11 benchmark on full settings windowed right now for about ~5 minutes. Temp steady at 55-56C and fan % at 39, no noticeable artifacts. Afterburner reads 993 core voltage, 1600 memory voltage and aux voltage is empty. There is also a power limit option in % that is at 0. I've never had driver crashes on the Unigen heaven tests, and I've done quite a few. I'm running it windowed, not sure if that makes a difference. I'll let it run for a while and update after maybe 30 mins.

Edit 3: Ran unigen heaven benchmark for about 40 mins with no problems with the factory overclock.

Edit 4: going to play dead island with some friends and see if that game crashes my driver. Going to max out settings as much as possible to try and stress it. It crashed after 10 minutes or so. I downclocked and it's stable now at 800mhz and 56C, over an hour of gameplay. The voltage reading in Open hardware monitor is 1.090 V for the GPU core
 
Last edited:
I have the same card and the same crashes, i've tried different drivers and several BIOS versions to no avail. Mine is actually 99% stable at 900mhz but even the tiniest of overclocks will start the driver crashing, also my card has terrible voltage droop - I can set it to 1.3v in Trixx but it's actual voltage is only in the vicinity of 1.180v.
 
That is odd.

I have the XFX DD OC'd 7950 and I'm completely stable at 1000Mhz GPU Clock and 1450Mhz Memory clock at 59C. It bumped my 3D Mark 11 Score by about 500ish point.
 
Sapphire Vapor-X here. No issues, unless I OC over 1000, or don't adjust fan speed to compensate for OC (currently 950, and 52%). I do use +20% on the power adjust. I dont want to bother using added software, so I will just use this setup, as I suspect it runs out of power headroom over 975-ish.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top