Bandwidth matters! My 7870 to 7950 experience..

M

mzs_biteme

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2001
Messages
1,595
Just a quick and dirty "FYI" (I'll do more in-depth benches later) but I just swapped out my 7870 to a 7950 (both Gigabyte Windforce) and can easily run 4xMSAA in BF3 at constant 60fps... With 7870 (OCed to 1200/1400) I had to bump MSAA down to 2x and was still getting dips below 60 (45~55fps range) on big Armored Kill maps especially the once with a lot of foliage... With 7950 (at stock 900/1250) I'm rock steady at 60, unless I get a million mines exploding in front of my tank at any give time... Ran a quick Heaven bench and my stock 7950 was faster than my highest OC for the 7870 (1210/1400)...:eek: Not bad for a $50 upgrade (after I'll sell my 7870)...;)
Now 7870 i a HELL of a card for the money, and I couldn't have been happier with it. It played all my games (except for BF3) at highest possible settings with no sweat, and I'd recommend it to anybody at that price range. But I'm a stickler about the MSAA crap, and BF3 really needs it...

I'll have some more benches, and OC results later...
 
OP its well known that HD 7950 is 3 - 7% slower than HD 7970 at the same clocks. the HD 7950 is the best bang for buck card in the market. period. which BIOS did your gigabyte card come with. some recent batches of cards are coming with FZ1 BIOS and 1000 Mhz boost clocks. but those are voltage locked. the older BIOS versions have unlocked voltage. you can easily get your card to 1100 - 1150 Mhz with a bit of tweaking.
 
raghu78 said:
OP its well known that HD 7950 is 3 - 7% slower than HD 7970 at the same clocks. the HD 7950 is the best bang for buck card in the market. period. which BIOS did your gigabyte card come with. some recent batches of cards are coming with FZ1 BIOS and 1000 Mhz boost clocks. but those are voltage locked. the older BIOS versions have unlocked voltage. you can easily get your card to 1100 - 1150 Mhz with a bit of tweaking.
Click to expand...

NO. I can confirm Gigabyte 7950 windforce with the new bios at 1000mhz stock is NOT voltage locked. I got mine 1 month ago and I could increase the volts to 1.3 in afterburner. It doesnt make much difference though, because max stable clock is 1150/1575 at 1.15v. 1175mhz will produce artifacts in crysis 1 on frost levels instantly no matter the voltage. Its also not the queitest card tbh. If I leave fan at auto speed it reaches 51-53%. That's enough to keep the core at 70°C max when OC'ed, but vrm temps were going trough the roof (~95°C), so I had to adjust fan speed to 60% during long gaming sessions of far cry 3 or crysis to bring it down to mid 80 degrees. BF3 MP doesn't stress the gpu that much in my case.
 
Juzh said:
NO. I can confirm Gigabyte 7950 windforce with the new bios at 1000mhz stock is NOT voltage locked. I got mine 1 month ago and I could increase the volts to 1.3 in afterburner. It doesnt make much difference though, because max stable clock is 1150/1575 at 1.15v. 1175mhz will produce artifacts in crysis 1 on frost levels instantly no matter the voltage. Its also not the queitest card tbh. If I leave fan at auto speed it reaches 51-53%. That's enough to keep the core at 70°C max when OC'ed, but vrm temps were going trough the roof (~95°C), so I had to adjust fan speed to 60% during long gaming sessions of far cry 3 or crysis to bring it down to mid 80 degrees. BF3 MP doesn't stress the gpu that much in my case.
Click to expand...

if you can run 1150 with 1.15v.. and cannot run 1175 with more voltage, I think your card is voltage locked... maybe you can change on AB but in fact it's not really changing anything.
 
Drangueos said:
if you can run 1150 with 1.15v.. and cannot run 1175 with more voltage, I think your card is voltage locked... maybe you can change on AB but in fact it's not really changing anything.
Click to expand...

Does GPU-z display the true voltage going into the card, regardless of what Afterburner "thinks" it's setting it at? BTW, I have mine at 1100/1275 (haven't messed with the RAM settings yet) at 1.2V..
 
Drangueos said:
if you can run 1150 with 1.15v.. and cannot run 1175 with more voltage, I think your card is voltage locked... maybe you can change on AB but in fact it's not really changing anything.
Click to expand...

I did some further research into this and this is what I've come up with.
This card is in fact voltage locked, but not in a normal way. Turns out my card has an FZ1 bios version which was only installed onto very few cards because it caused considerable amount of users to have VRM temp issues. This is the only bios which comes with 1000mhz on the clock from factory. They do this by increasing stock load voltage to a fixed 1,25v and nothing you set in afterburner will make any difference. People with high asic scores were experiencing crashes because of low voltage leak which increased their vrm temps above 100°C. Mine has a relatively low score of 64% so that may be the reason its stable at 1150/1575 with vrm in mid 90 on auto fan speed. Solution is to download a newer bios which removes this issues and comes with more reasonable default setup. You will however most likely encounter similiar problems if you then increase voltage yourself.
Since I'm not getting any issues yet, I'm sticking with it for the momment. Chances of you actually getting card such as this are really low though.
 
Juzh said:
I did some further research into this and this is what I've come up with.
This card is in fact voltage locked, but not in a normal way. Turns out my card has an FZ1 bios version which was only installed onto very few cards because it caused considerable amount of users to have VRM temp issues. This is the only bios which comes with 1000mhz on the clock from factory. They do this by increasing stock load voltage to a fixed 1,25v and nothing you set in afterburner will make any difference. People with high asic scores were experiencing crashes because of low voltage leak which increased their vrm temps above 100°C. Mine has a relatively low score of 64% so that may be the reason its stable at 1150/1575 with vrm in mid 90 on auto fan speed. Solution is to download a newer bios which removes this issues and comes with more reasonable default setup. You will however most likely encounter similiar problems if you then increase voltage yourself.
Since I'm not getting any issues yet, I'm sticking with it for the momment. Chances of you actually getting card such as this are really low though.
Click to expand...


I have had two of those cards. I flashed one of the BIOS to a sapphire unlocked and went to town, 1300mhz on both of them at 1.25v. The actual load voltage of those cards is 1.150.
 
LigTasm said:
I have had two of those cards. I flashed one of the BIOS to a sapphire unlocked and went to town, 1300mhz on both of them at 1.25v. The actual load voltage of those cards is 1.150.
Click to expand...



kick ass hack that card.
 
LigTasm said:
I have had two of those cards. I flashed one of the BIOS to a sapphire unlocked and went to town, 1300mhz on both of them at 1.25v. The actual load voltage of those cards is 1.150.
Click to expand...

You can do that? which bios?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top