OC and BIOS update 7950

[Tal_be]

Hello everyone!
I have Sapphire 7950 dual - x, which defaults are 810/1250.

I succeeded to reach 1100/1500 at 1.218v with Trixx, and less by the MSI AB.

I have 2 questions:
I've seen on this forum OC results of 1200/1600 at 1.218v and even higher!
What am I doing wrong?
I get my 7950 run at 57c max! Why I get my computer crashes and stucks in higher clocks when other can reach this?

My second question:
I've seen that there is BIOS update from ATI:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/134516-the-amd-radeon-hd-7950-bios-issue-take-two

But I read that it increase the 800mhz default to 925, but my card is not the 800 model, so this update is not for my specified card? Is this update can give me more OC ability?

Thanks!

 

[Tal_be]

Please someone?

 

[FireBean]

This should be eveything you should ever need to know. NOTE: Pick a method. Do not do them all.
This Copy and Paste goes to the credit of tsm106 on Overclock.net.

This will be for collecting all the How To's in one place. If you have something to add let me know and I will gladly add it.
Here's some stuff to start things off.

Resources:

Driver downloads

http://benchmark3d.com/category/drivers


RC11 - old faithful 7970 drivers


AMD clock control files

MSI Guru Patch

http://www.overclock.net/attachments/3614

RC11 extracted files

RC11 dlls.zip 338k .zip file

**Extract to system32 and syswow64 directories, C:\windows\system32 etc and drop the files into your Afterburner directory as well.

How to:


Manual driver uninstall Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)Run the driver setup.exe, choose uninstall, express. Once completed, do not reboot and go to control panel, run Programs and Features, click on AMD Catalyst Install Manager, click change, next, Express Uninstall All AMD Software, after a second pop up, choose Remove. If anything fails, not much you can do so move on to next step. If you have caps installed, uninstall them as well at this time but do not agree to reboot when it asks you to do so.

**If you installed a modded driver, choose custom and check everything before continuing on.

At this point, you have the option of blasting all the old radeon gpu keys if you want to or are OCD like me. I can't stand having more keys than I have cards and it's just so dirty looking.
Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)Anyways, open regedit and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

You can simply delete the whole folder 4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318, It will fail but conveniently for us it will wipe the subfolders for us. You can also delete the CurrentControlSet2 folder ie. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet2\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} in the same manner but it's not a big deal.

You don't have to mess with ControlSet1 as it is replicated with CurrentControlSet and vice versa. ControlSet2 will need to be manually cleaned however.

Now back to device manager.


Go to device manger and uninstall the standard vga device or AMD Radeon XXX if you see it. If you choose to clean the registry, you must not skip this step. But don't worry, deleting the devices is safe. If prompted to reboot, choose yes. If you are asked or given the choice to delete the driver, choose to do so.

**This portion deals with deleting the leftover driver files. I would recommend in most day to day situations to skip this portion as it's not needed. The dll's will get overwritten upon driver install anyways. However if you have a situation that you are trying to recover from (failed sweeper/installer) this will remove just the dll associated with the gpu driver. It is best for AMD CPU based users to skip this part as sometimes AMD cpu/mb drivers are tied to the gpu drivers, especially in cases of APU. If you do not use an AMD CPU continue on for the best OCD experience.

windows\system32
windows\system32\drivers
windows\syswow64

Delete everything that starts "ati" then xxxx, everything. For ex. it starts with the file atiadlxx.dll and goes to ativvsvl.dat. There's nothing there that starts ati that isn't driver related. If there are files locked, skip them and move on. Now you are ready to reboot, upon logon windows will install default vga device and ask to reboot.

**There may be some dll's that were not deleted previously due to them being loaded in memory during the file deletion. You can safely delete those after reboot, once Windows has re-installed the standard vga driver if you so choose, depending on your OCD level.

Upon reboot, you will be at a clean state, or that is 99% clean of AMD drivers.



Driver install Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)Thankfully this is the easiest part of AMD driver process. Click on the setup.exe and you are off to the races. After reboot, install the latest CAP (Crossfire Application Profile).
**If you are installing a modded driver, choose custom install, and check the box to install the bundled CAP file.



Afterburner install - unofficial overclock method Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)**Assumes you have no instance of AB, aka afterburner installed previously. If you do have AB installed previously, uninstall it or delete the folder. Also, it is generally a good idea to uninstall AB before any new driver install when you are crossfired. AB will automatically run, even when run at windows start is disabled, and when it does and it tries to fool with clocks you will BSOD with a 07E code.


Run afterburner install. At this point, if you choose default install directory, there will incur security issues later on, just keep that in mind. I would recommend you install it in another folder/drive.

After install completes, do not check the option to start afterburner. If you are crossfired follow A- below to disable ULPS if you are using Unofficial Overclock Method (UOM) or , skip this portion if you are using Official Overclock Method (-xcl).

A- Disabling ULPS
Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)Open regedit and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

This key 4D36E968, under CurrentControlSet is the only folder you need to access. You can ignore the others, so don't search for it just traverse directly to said folder. It's time to disable ULPS, or ultra low power savings. Inside the folder you will find more folders, 0000/0001/0002/etc so on and on.

Open each folder and double click on EnableULPS and change to 0. You do not need to change any other key, or any keys that look similar, just change EnableULPS. Close regedit. End of A-

At this point if you installed into default directory, you will have a security issue. Open file manager, go to where you installed afterburner and right click on MSIAfterburner.cfg and go to security, click edit, add yourself and give yourself full control, click ok.

Now go back and open MSIAfterburner.cfg in notepad.

Scroll to bottom and change this:

[ATIADLHAL]
UnofficialOverclockingEULA =
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 0

to this:

[ATIADLHAL]
UnofficialOverclockingEULA = I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 1


**Note on the mode setting. Some new games are causing clock conflicts with Powerplay creating flickering on the desktop. You can avoid this by choosing 2, instead of 1. I am running with Powerplay off. Look Mom, no flickering. Refer to the bottom of Post 2 for more info on this.

Close and save MSIAfterburner.cfg. At this point download the file from the link above for AMD Clock Control files and run it. Do not reboot.

Now you can run afterburner for the first time. Afterburner will analyze the gpu asic and ask to reboot when ready. Choose yes to reboot. After reboot, you will have afterburner installed, you can then unlock voltage control and monitoring, etc. Happy overclocking.



Afterburner install - official overclock method aka -xcl Part 1 for single cards Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)
Install driver of choice. Tri and quadfire people, I'd recommend you stick with RC11 and refer to Part 2 for getting the rest of your cards enabled.

Install AB, I recommend in a different directory from default. In general you will need to install the above linked clock control files. RC11 does not need these files.

On your desktop is the shortcut of AB, make a copy of it to edit. Add /xcl to the end of the target box after right clicking it/properties. Click ok to close the window. Make sure to close AB before running this newly edited shortcut.

After AB's prompt, reboot and save this shortcut and rename it so you have it for safe keeping. You will need to re-run if it you change drivers again.

For some background on the xcl process. The -xcl switch is just to tell AB to create new modified Powerplay Tables in the registry. All it does is unlock the overclock limits of Overdrive. Note you won't be using Overdrive at all. You'll instead be using AB but using AB just as default with only the check marks for unlocking voltage. Don't do anything in AB's config file, that method is for "unofficial method" whereas you'll be using "official method."
When you add -xcl to the AB shortcut, it doesn't run, it merely imports the Powerplay Tables as mentioned above. Once that's done, you have to then remove the -xcl you added, and reboot. Upon reboot, you can open up AB and overclock like normal.
**There are a couple caveats with the -xcl method. The most annoying is that AB cannot edit the Powerplay Tables of more than 1 card. And that 1 card is only the active card so if you have crossfire you will have to jump thru some hurdles. There's a trick to add all the Powerplay Tables for ppl in crossfire in that link.
**The other annoyance is that you will have to redo the -xcl method after each driver install.
**Also, you will need the clock control files.
It's also a good idea if you are crossfired, to do this on a cleaned registry so you know which Radeon folder to edit.Thus the bottom line is we use AB to overclock without enabling UOM and without disabling ULPS. When you set your overclock in AB, this gets passed to Overdrive and you stay inside AMD's Powersaving tech. For voltage control, we use AB as we normally would.



Afterburner install - official overclock method aka -xcl Part 2 for crossfire users - addon Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)AB xcl method above will only unlock the Overdrive limits for the active card. If you have other cards in a crossfire, technically you will have to disable crossfire and plug a monitor into each card and run the xcl unlock process to unlock each card. This can be quite the hassle. Luckily there's an easier way.

Anyways, I extracted the powerplay tables allowing one to edit and not do the song and dance.

*Open notepad, copy paste this in there save it as a *.reg file or rename .reg then merge that into your reg. Edit the "0000" for each card you have. Simply paste/create the key below and label each corresponding key 0000/0001/002/etc for as many entries or cards as you have in the registry. Also with this key, you don't have to create the shortcut sd with Part 1.



Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000]


"PP_PhmSoftPowerPlayTable"=hex:f3,01,06,01,00,00,00,10,18,58,00,6b,00,dd,00,e8,\
03,e8,03,58,00,00,80,03,00,10,00,00,02,07,3b,00,00,6d,00,df,00,00,3f,01,0a,\
00,3f,01,4f,01,4e,02,00,00,27,10,00,00,5b,01,75,01,8f,01,00,00,c2,01,00,00,\
04,01,00,00,af,00,00,00,60,ea,00,00,a9,01,52,03,00,00,14,00,40,00,04,01,00,\
00,03,01,04,05,00,03,02,05,05,00,03,03,06,06,06,07,10,54,69,01,1c,19,02,01,\
ff,6b,03,02,00,00,00,00,00,50,c3,00,80,38,01,20,03,5c,03,01,00,00,00,00,00,\
30,75,00,80,38,01,20,03,5c,03,01,00,00,00,00,00,40,9c,00,80,38,01,20,03,5c,\
03,02,00,00,00,00,00,30,75,00,98,3a,00,52,03,6b,03,00,00,00,00,00,00,b4,c3,\
00,1c,19,02,b6,03,6b,03,01,00,00,00,00,00,30,75,00,98,3a,00,20,03,6b,03,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,04,18,08,00,00,00,78,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,05,00,00,00,78,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,04,00,00,7a,00,00,00,00,00,00,40,19,01,00,c0,da,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,78,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,02,06,7c,15,8c,23,48,26,d0,07,7c,15,58,1b,48,26,0c,00,20,bf,02,00,\
f4,e9,03,00,cb,01,05,30,75,00,20,03,50,c3,00,52,03,60,ea,00,84,03,70,11,01,\
b6,03,54,69,01,01,ff,05,98,3a,00,5c,03,30,75,00,61,03,80,38,01,66,03,1c,19,\
02,6b,03,80,19,02,6c,03,05,98,3a,00,20,03,30,75,00,52,03,80,38,01,84,03,1c,\
19,02,b6,03,80,19,02,01,ff,04,20,03,00,00,00,00,52,03,00,00,00,00,b6,03,00,\
00,00,00,92,04,00,00,00,00,01,e8,03,98,3a,00,a8,61,00,00,03,d8,d6,00,d8,d6,\
00,70,11,01,70,11,01,30,75,00,30,75,00,02,b6,03,00,1a,04,01,06,01,01,00,01,\
02,02,00,01,02,03,00,03

**If for some reason it's not working for you, you can simply open up your registry, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E968. Easy way is Local, System, CurrentControlSet, Control, Class, then scroll down to "4D36E9" set then hit the "68" at the end. Inside you find "0000" files, and each folder represents a physical card per slot. So if you moved card 1 that was in slot 1, into slot 4, that will create a new folder. Try not to move cards around too much because it will create a lot of folders, making it confusing. Also, if you followed my manual uninstall method, your registry should be cleaned up nicely.

Ok, now scroll down to the 4D36E968 folder and extract that folder to some place. Open up some place, and edit the reg file. Basically you just delete everything except the table and header from above. And then simply create more entries as instructed above.




Make Afterburner show real voltage

Show real voltage in Afterburner for 7970s.
Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)With Afterburner closed, open your Afterburner install directory, traverse to profiles. There will be a config file for each card or cards inside. If you have more files than cards, then you can just delete all the files, ie. VEN_1002&DEV....cfg. This will effectively reset Afterburner. Now run Afterburner again and it will configure your cards and create new config files. Now you can edit the newly created config files. Close AB and...

Add this under the Settings for each card you have.

[Settings]
VDDC_CHL8228_VIDReadback = 0
MVDDC_CHL8228_VIDReadback = 0





Unlocking and editing voltage on Caymans using RBE - Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)
Original thread for 6950 to 6970 Mod

Radeon Bios Editor

*Before you start, put RBE, atiwinflash, and you extracted bios file into a folder on the c drive, named unlock.

Start by confirming your card/s are on switch #1. Open gpuz, underneath the AMD icon, next to bios version, click on the green arrowed bios chip button, choose save to file. Save as unlock.rom.

Start Radeon Bios Editor, RBE for short. Click Load Bios, choose your unlock.rom file. Go to the 4th tab, Additional features and under unlock 6950 ->6970, choose to unlock. That was easy!

Now go to the 2nd tab, Clock settings and click o GPU registers (bottom left). View/Change voltage registers window will open and with four boxes. The two on the right are what we are after. Depending on what your asic % is, you will have either both boxes show 1100, or 1100 and 1065. Some cards work with the 3rd box and some with the 4th box. It doesn't really matter so we will change both to whatever voltage you've decided upon.

**Caution Label here. Over 1.3v or 1300mv is only safe with water. 1.4v is the dead zone, do not push your luck. Whatever you choose to put in is your choice.

Once you've edited your volts, click ok, then Save the bios.

Now you are ready for flashing. I prefer to use a dosprompt, I can just copy paste and push the up key to repeat commands for crossfire configs. I can flash four cards in less than 5 minutes this way.

Thus open a admin dos prompt. Text taken from wizzard from TPU.


- Black command prompt windows opens
- Type "cd\"
- Type "cd unlock"
- Type "atiwinflash -unlockrom 0" <-- the 0 means first adapter, if you have multiple cards *change the 0 to the next card in line, etc etc*
- Type "atiwinflash -f -p 0 unlock.bin"
- It should complete the flashing process with a message saying something with "verified".

If you have multiple cards, repeat the process until all cards are flashed. Once completed you are ready for reboot. There should be no driver changes, but confirm you have new shader count in gpuz. Now onto overclocking Caymans.



Overclocking on Cayman using Overdrive Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)Racerx mod


The beauty of using RBE is that we get to use AMD's full suite of powersaving tech w/o breaking anything. And what goes hand in hand with RBE is the Racerx mod.

In Post #2 you will find attached two versions of Racerx. One is an old version and the current version. If you find that the current version won't run, you can use the original. The difference is that v16 brings a few of value added features that are nice, but what's most important is just raising the Overdrive limits.

Run racerx, leave everything default except for Upper Limits. Raise that to a sensible upper limit. Click create file and save it, choose yes to apply it to the registery. Reboot and you will have raised Overdrive limits.

*Hopefully you've cleaned your registry out from the above method so you will only have 1 folder if you are single gpu. Thus you need only import the reg file. If however you have crossfire or more, you simply edit the Racerx reg file and create copies of the data making a separate entry for each card.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000]

Copy data and make another entry changing the bolded digit to 1, for the second card, 2 for the third card. If you did not clean your registry you will have to determine what numbers point to which card on your own.


Once done and rebooted, you no longer have to use Afterburner for overclocking. You can however still use it to display OSD stats.



Yahoo, +50 Powertune Warning: Spoiler! (Click to hide)Racerx also has a mod to raise powertune to +50. http://www.techimo.com/forum/3265850-post70.html

Do you still have the racerx.reg file on your desktop?
If not, re-run the tool and when it asks to save it, save it as racerx.reg. you need to add the .reg after the name or it will save it as a generic file, because after it creates it do NOT merge it.

Now, right click on it and click "edit".
This should open it in Notepad.

look down about 4 lines and you'll see the number 14 in between a bunch of zeros.
Carefully change the 14 to a 32, making sure not to change or add any spaces or extra commas.
Close it and let it save it. Then click on it and allow it to merge.
reboot, then CCC should have the 50 back for you.