7970 @ 1070/1400 = Crashing?!!!

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Xinmosni

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 12, 2012
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Just wondering if anyone else has had issues overclocking their stock-cooled 7970?

I have a Sapphire 7970 and recently tried to set a moderate overclock of 1070/1400, however I eventually get crashes in games if I leave the settings at this, and artificating occurs shortly thereafter. I restart my system and things return to normal, but I just don't get it, because my GPU temps are far within reason (~75C max).

The game I tried this on was Ridge Racer: Unbounded. The races go fine for a few minutes, then the screen freezes only to return with artifacting after 10 seconds or so.

Any tips? Just wondering if an aftermarket cooler might resolve this or if I'm SOL...
 
Xinmosni said:
Just wondering if anyone else has had issues overclocking their stock-cooled 7970?

I have a Sapphire 7970 and recently tried to set a moderate overclock of 1070/1400, however I eventually get crashes in games if I leave the settings at this, and artificating occurs shortly thereafter. I restart my system and things return to normal, but I just don't get it, because my GPU temps are far within reason (~75C max).

The game I tried this on was Ridge Racer: Unbounded. The races go fine for a few minutes, then the screen freezes only to return with artifacting after 10 seconds or so.

Any tips? Just wondering if an aftermarket cooler might resolve this or if I'm SOL...
Click to expand...

Are you using manual fan? You may have to up voltage a tad as well, and/or increase powertune.
 
Oh really, I have to increase voltage for such a moderate overclock? I had no idea, sorry; am used to overclocking much lower end cards (5770, 6850), and I had read on another thread that some people are able to get max sliders at stock voltage. I just wanted a moderate overclock for around 10% increase until I feel like spending $80 on the Arctic Cooling cooler...

Also, no, I am using a custom fan profile which is probably even more excessive than some people's manuals. I lock my office while I'm at school/work, so I don't want to chance it overheating while leaving Bitcoin mining up:

7970FanProf.jpg


(Bitcoin is running right now, so this should be seen as a "taxed" temp and not an idle temp)
 
If temps are within reason, then I see no reason to think that a new cooler would "guarantee" any better overclocks. Of course, it might give you more overvolting headroom. That said, overclocks are never guaranteed, so you might just be SOL
 
Damn. Well when setting 1070/1400, my bitcoin mining is increased just fine without affecting the rest of my system's performance (i.e. no freezing), so perhaps it's just that one game. I'll try it again on another game such as BF3, I just didn't want to overdo it like I did with an XFX 6850 one time. Fortunately, that card was within its 30-day return from the vendor. This one is not -_-

In that case, though, I'm positive the problem was that I left it at too high of a temp for too long (90C for 5 minutes straight because I got called away from my computer), not because of overclock settings themselves.
 
it could be that your card has higher ASIC quality and lower default voltage, my 1.05v card won't hit 1070 without a voltage bump, I have to go to 1.139v to get 1100 stable accross all games. Use GPUZ and figure out your ASIC quality and use MSI Afterburner to figure out your default voltage.

there are a few...
??? % = 1.02v
85~% = 1.05v
81~% = 1.12v
everything else = 1.175v
 
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Digital Viper-X- said:
it could be that your card has higher ASIC quality and lower default voltage, my 1.05v card won't hit 1070 without a voltage bump, I have to go to 1.39v to get 1100 stable accross all games. Use GPUZ and figure out your ASIC quality and use MSI Afterburner to figure out your default voltage.

there are a few...
??? % = 1.02v
85~% = 1.05v
81~% = 1.12v
everything else = 1.175v
Click to expand...

i was going to say much the same

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/xfx-r7970-double-dissipation-edition_2.html

The ASIC Quality screenshot on the right can be evoked from GPU-Z's context menu and is individual for each graphics card and GPU. This feature has been developed for Nvidia’s Fermi (GX10x and GF11x) and AMD’s Southern Islands chips (Radeon HD 78xx and HD 79xx) and is supposed to indicate the quality of the specific GPU, in percent, based on electrical leakage data. The GPU of our sample of the card has an ASIC quality of 76.6%. The higher this number, the lower voltage the GPU needs to work at the default clock rate and the higher overclocking results you can get with it by increasing its voltage.
According to Alexey Nikolaichuk (the author of RivaTuner and MSI Afterburner), the correlation between voltage and quality is like follows:
ASIC quality < 75% - 1.1750 V;
ASIC quality < 80% - 1.1125 V;
ASIC quality < 85% - 1.0500 V;
ASIC quality < 90% - 1.0250 V;
ASIC quality &#8804; 100% - 1.0250 V.
Click to expand...

here's a pic of my sapphire 7970 ref card...
7970asic.png


also another suggestion, MSI's after burner is a better OC/monitoring tool imho.
you'll need the latest version to get the voltage control & monitoring (2.2.0 beta14).
lastly need to make sure you set the 'Power control settting' to +20% in the overdrive section of AMD's Catalyst panel.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
it could be that your card has higher ASIC quality and lower default voltage, my 1.05v card won't hit 1070 without a voltage bump, I have to go to 1.139v to get 1100 stable accross all games. Use GPUZ and figure out your ASIC quality and use MSI Afterburner to figure out your default voltage.

there are a few...
??? % = 1.02v
85~% = 1.05v
81~% = 1.12v
everything else = 1.175v
Click to expand...

same as Digital Viper-X-, i have a high ASIC quality card with low default voltage; 87% ASIC at 1.05V default. i wouldn't be stable at 1070 on stock voltage. i have to bump it up to 1.087V to be stable at 1125. OP just keep in mind that a little voltage goes a long way.
 
Mine has a default voltage of 1.17 and I can only hit 1125, anything higher crashes even at 1.2v
 
After reading everyone's comments, I downloaded GPU-Z and found out that my ASIC quality is 89.1% and thus its stock voltage is 1.025v. I'd have responded earlier but am still reading about this (and also had a busy day).

I've been using MSI Afterburner for my 5770 and 6850 since day one, but since this is my first Sapphire card I thought I'd try their TRIXX software. Guess Afterburner is still the best, and so I've redownloaded that (Beta15).

Thank you so much, guys! The ASIC ratings sure are different from before, wow...

EDIT:

Tested 1070/1400 on Ridge Racer: Unbounded with a bump in voltage to the next logical step: 1.050V (or 1049 in Afterburner) instead of stock 1.025V.

The results? No crashing, no artifacting after playing continously for an hour!

I'm tempted to bump this to max (normal limit) sliders; however, I think I'll wait until I purchase the Accelero Xtreme 7970 first so that I don't have to worry about temps as much.
 
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The higher ASIC quality is a misnomer. There's a certain post from an AMD engineer floating around that explains their VID settings. Simply, those chips with lower VID's (and are erroneously labeled higher quality), are actually higher leakage chips that were assigned lower VID's so that they would stay within TDP specs. Therefore, these chips with lower VID's are actually poor overclockers, as some of you have already relayed from your own experiences. This is contrary from what we've seen in the past.
 
Mr. K6 said:
The higher ASIC quality is a misnomer. There's a certain post from an AMD engineer floating around that explains their VID settings. Simply, those chips with lower VID's (and are erroneously labeled higher quality), are actually higher leakage chips that were assigned lower VID's so that they would stay within TDP specs. Therefore, these chips with lower VID's are actually poor overclockers, as some of you have already relayed from your own experiences. This is contrary from what we've seen in the past.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say that exactly. From every card I've seen, high ASIC means it comes with a lower VID, that's about it. I do recall seeing that AMD reps post saying that it did also mean higher leakage, but it doesn't seem to be affected oc's much.

My card is a 1.05 VID and oc's like a champ. Every day gaming is in sig to deal with a lower fan noise. If I crank the fan to say 70% I can do 1265-1275 ish with 1800 on the memory. In any case; factor in case, cooling, psu and ymmv.
 
Someone suggested bumping power control in ccc, I find this not true, all the slider seems to do is adjust the cards ability to throttle the clock changing mine from 0 to 20 did virtually nothing for performance or stability but I haven't pushed past ccc limits yet
 
Xinmosni said:
After reading everyone's comments, I downloaded GPU-Z and found out that my ASIC quality is 89.1% and thus its stock voltage is 1.025v. I'd have responded earlier but am still reading about this (and also had a busy day).

I've been using MSI Afterburner for my 5770 and 6850 since day one, but since this is my first Sapphire card I thought I'd try their TRIXX software. Guess Afterburner is still the best, and so I've redownloaded that (Beta15).

Thank you so much, guys! The ASIC ratings sure are different from before, wow...

EDIT:

Tested 1070/1400 on Ridge Racer: Unbounded with a bump in voltage to the next logical step: 1.050V (or 1049 in Afterburner) instead of stock 1.025V.

The results? No crashing, no artifacting after playing continously for an hour!

I'm tempted to bump this to max (normal limit) sliders; however, I think I'll wait until I purchase the Accelero Xtreme 7970 first so that I don't have to worry about temps as much.
Click to expand...

good to hear, you can bump the voltage by .125v max I believe. set it to 1.1v and see what you can get to.

as far as the vid / asic quality thing goes, I read the same thing about intel cpus a while back, that lower VID meant higher leakage chip. Also for AMD it can limit your max oc :p
 
I've heard around the just hitting the switch on the bios has another profile installed already that gives more headroom for overclocking/stability. if it doesn't work you can try lowering the memory oc. your core oc isn't too high for instability
 
I thought the physical BIOS switch was just for "OC" editions of the 7970...
 
Xinmosni said:
I thought the physical BIOS switch was just for "OC" editions of the 7970...
Click to expand...

All 7970s have dual BIOS. Most cards, but not all, have higher voltage profiles on BIOS 2 - most cards OC better with BIOS2.
 
xoleras said:
All 7970s have dual BIOS. Most cards, but not all, have higher voltage profiles on BIOS 2 - most cards OC better with BIOS2.
Click to expand...

is that true? i haven't touched the bios switch but you've got me curious.
 
The nice thing is you can power off your pc, flick the switch, turn it back on see if it boots up fine. If it doesn't you can power back off & turn it back. It's not like your flashing so the danger is low.. i've thought about it, but maybe i'm too cautious, like it's going to hurt something lol. that switch is staring at me....
 
FFS, you guys are making me turn this thing into a race car. I've already pushed it to max normal sliders out of curiousity (with 1.25V because 1.1V gave me artifacting after 10minutes), and now I'm wondering how far this thing will go WITHOUT an aftermarket cooler. And now you tell me it indeed has a BIOS switch!

Whereas my old cards were limited by heat, I think the 7970 is limited by how much balls its owner has, Jesus Christ...
 
Xinmosni said:
Whereas my old cards were limited by heat, I think the 7970 is limited by how much balls its owner has, Jesus Christ...
Click to expand...
It's truly an [H] card when it comes to overclocking. Now punch it! :p
 
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