7970 Instability Thread

[next-Jin]

Starting a new thread concerning certain aspects of these cards which are not adding up. Several problems are being reported mostly dealing with voltages being reported in different programs using Afterburner and Trixx (or technically any program I would imagine)

• 7970 experiences a driver crash resulting in a driver restart
• 7970 crashes immediately in Furmark if using any OC tool
• 7970 seems to crash causing the videocard to seemingly powerdown
• Reports of different voltages using two different programs causing the card to run 3D apps at 2D clock rates resulting in a crash.

All of these I believe revolve around the same issue which I presume will be addressed with new drivers or program updates. Personally I can not use any program without significant problems with my Sapphire card, as soon as I open them up and run something (especcially Furmark) it will crash causing video loss which can only be solved with a restart and resetting Powertune to 0 then back to +20%.

I can overclock perfectly fine in CCC yet if I even move up 1 Mhz I will have issues in either Afterburner or TriXX.

 

[valkrien]

Diamond 7970 Issues:

Driver not responding error resulting in game crash or infinite sound loop

Screen goes black without notice and sound freezes. Only a hard reset fixes this

Temperature spikes and the fan does not respond to the increase in temperature resulting in thermal max being hit shutting down card

Just a few issues that I have had so far.

 

[l88bastard]

Guys it could be other issues besides the card. I couldn't overclock my 7970 xfx black at all, but the problem ended up being my mobos pcie slot #1. I have a rampage III extreme and after moving my card to slot 3 it OC's to 1200/1600 @1.2v like a champ.

 

[kinjo]

Having had some issues with the voltage irregularities here is what I have found out so far byt talking to on various forums and through personal research.

1. Stock voltage for some cards is 1.05 volts while for most it is 1.17 volts however Afterburner/GPUTweak/Trixx will put all cards at a default 1.17 volts.

2. Cards with a default voltage of 1.17 can hit the limits of the CCC slider whereas ones with a default VID of 1.05 can not.

3. Cards with a stock VID of 1.05 which get auto bumped to 1.17 by oc software usually gain significant OC headroom at the new voltage putting them on par with the 1.17 VID cards.

4. Afterburner is the only software which actually reports current voltage for the 7970.

5. 7970's seem to have some sort of vdroop voltage mechanism for example a 7970 set to 1.1 volts on afterburner will only actually draw 1.07-1.08 volts at load.

6. Afterburner (but not other OC software) will sometimes report extremely shot extremely large voltage spikes which range anywhere from 1.3 volts to 1.5 volts this appears to be a software issue and not a case of the voltage actually getting that high.

7. Max safe Temp appears to be 95C

8. Anytime a 7970 exceeds 95c it will immediately move the fan up to 100% till it gets temps back under control.

9. Max safe voltage appears to be 1.3 volts (assuming you can keep it cool) no guarantees on this one could be higher or lower but it's looking like that's what it is,

 

[valkrien]

Guys it could be other issues besides the card. I couldn't overclock my 7970 xfx black at all, but the problem ended up being my mobos pcie slot #1. I have a rampage III extreme and after moving my card to slot 3 it OC's to 1200/1600 @1.2v like a champ.

I was thinking along the lines of the overclock as well. I uninstalled all OC software and reset the card to defaults. Still experiencing the above. Tried moving it to PCIe Slot #2 but my Asus P8P68 EVO defaults it to x8 for some reason even if the other slot is empty, and the issues remain.

I returned the card to Fry's earlier today and the replacement card (same brand etc) is working much better. Less frequent errors and I can overclock to the max sliders in CCC where the other card would lock up even 50mhz above the default.