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Do newer Catalyst versions throttle 7970s?

T

Teenyman45

2[H]4U
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Nov 29, 2010
Messages
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I just started OCing my 7970s again now that I finally have three working ones (and other aspects of my life have calmed down) and am suddenly getting weird throttling/downclocking issues while benchmarking.

For the record I am using Catalyst 12.11 with no mods/packs/ or betas and all of my 7970's are reference models. The 7970s are as follows:
1) Sapphire A (a launch day with a reviewer BIOS that allows for overclocking to go to 2GHz);
2) XFX Black Edition (a launch day BE exchanged for a faulty Sapphire);
and 3) Sapphire B (a reference model voluntary downgrade because I had a long series of Sapphire Dual OC cards each of which had crappy VRMs).

Since I remembered reading a while back that Afterburner had been modified to prevent OCing past the basic spec of 1125 unless one did some weird things to preserve certain drivers from the early versions of CCC, I decided to flash Sapphire B's BIOS. Sapphire B now has a BIOS that allows Afterburner/Trixx/CCC to take the GPU frequency over 1600 MHz. The card does 1125 at stock voltage both pre and post flash.

With stock voltage performance in mind, I bumped the voltage a tad and tried 1175 in Afterburner with the blower fan set to near max. The next step was to fire up Furmark's 1920x1080 15min benchmark for preliminary testing. It ran fine for a few minutes at 68-69fps, then stuttered a bit at 66-67, and then dropped and pegged at 63fps. Looking at the GPU frequency graph in Afterburner, I saw that as the card crossed approximately ~70C it would throttle down to about 1050.

I then tried out Sapphire B with the same values in Trixx and got an identical result. At this point I thought it might be the BIOS.

To test the BIOS I swapped in Sapphire A that has the early reviewer potential 2000 MHz BIOS. This card has in the past benched to a bit past 1200 in Furmark but generally need to be at 1175 in games. In the past it would not downclock and when pushed too hard would simply freeze as my post in early 2012 described. Now however, when I tried Sapphire A I got the same downclocking 63fps throttling that Sapphire B was doing.

Why are my cards just now throttling? Is this a known issue that I had been too out of the loop to notice? I want my speed back! I have this need to know what these cards can do air cooled before I stick my Swiftech Komodo blocks on them.

Thanks for putting up with my long-ish post. After this comes the joys of playing with a 3930K on an Intel DX79SR board.
 
latest 12.11 and cap, previous issue with x79 boards so not sure if that relate to your trottling or not.
 
I was not using any CAPs and I am still using the X58 rig in my sig for all my benching/ BIOS flashing. I only have one copy of WIndows 7 (a retail version!) so I wanted to get all my existing hardware in order before reformatting and re-installing to do a clean switch to X79.

To avoid somebody raising this as an issue later, yes, I do keep powertune set to +20 and for nearly a year have dearly wanted a way to push it to +25 or +30.
 
This may be obvious, but did you remember to crank up power control to 20%?
 
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