Sapphire Trixx vs. AMD CCC for OC?

A

Arch

Gawd
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Mar 9, 2000
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Maybe this is a basic question but I can't seem to find anything on it. Why would one use the Sapphire Trixx program to overclock instead of the little overclocking tab within CCC? Don't these two do the exactly the same thing?

edit: I'm using a Sapphire 7870 OC card, running at stock right now.
 
Arch said:
Maybe this is a basic question but I can't seem to find anything on it. Why would one use the Sapphire Trixx program to overclock instead of the little overclocking tab within CCC? Don't these two do the exactly the same thing?

edit: I'm using a Sapphire 7870 OC card, running at stock right now.
Click to expand...

AMD CCC allows overclocking at stock voltage only. So whatever best you can do at stock voltage you will get those speeds. Sapphire trixx allows you to increase core voltage and go for very high overclock speeds. If you have a card which overclocks well , you can hit 1250 - 1300 Mhz with sapphire trixx. Most HD 7870 cards do 1150 Mhz at stock voltage. Few cards do 1200 Mhz at stock voltage while others need extra voltage.
Sapphire trixx also allows you to save your overclocked settings in profiles. so you can load them up when you want (when playing a game). the rest of the time you can run at stock settings.
 
Thanks for the info. A few follow up questions:

1. What does the "Power Limit" setting do in CCC? I can't seem to find any good info on it.

2. How does one test stability on the video card overclock? For CPUs I always run several hours of Prime95 torture testing. Is there something similar for graphics cards?
 
1. the power setting increases the TDP limit, so the card wont thermally throttle down when it reaches its power consumption limit.

Basically, it allows the card to run hotter.

2. Run Heaven for an hour or 2, that should be fine.
 
Thanks for that! I've been tinkering with my Sapphire 7870 OC. Seems it has basically no head room at all and won't even do 1100mhz without bombing out in MS Flight. Bummer!
 
Arch said:
Thanks for that! I've been tinkering with my Sapphire 7870 OC. Seems it has basically no head room at all and won't even do 1100mhz without bombing out in MS Flight. Bummer!
Click to expand...

If you want try more voltage, say 1.25v. Its ok to go upto 1.3v though I would say 1.25v is safe if you want to keep the card for a long time.
 
Arch said:
Thanks for that! I've been tinkering with my Sapphire 7870 OC. Seems it has basically no head room at all and won't even do 1100mhz without bombing out in MS Flight. Bummer!
Click to expand...

that seems unlikely, the sapphie OC edditions usually have allot of room.

have you pushed the power slider all the way to 20%? you basically cant to any oc without it at 20%, because it will thottle.
 
I know, I've read numerous reviews that did 1200+ without any voltage increase. No such luck on mine. I even tried the Trixx utility with the power slider up to 50%. Didn't make any difference. Strange thing though, the voltage reported by Trixx is 1168. The HardOCP reviewed card was up at 1218. The BIOS versions are the same and my stock clock rates are the same also so I'm not sure why there's a difference.

For the record, I'm running the cat 12.7 beta drivers on a fresh install of Win7.
 
just for the heck of it, clean out 12.7 an try 12.4 and see of the voltage changes. some people have reported similar odd voltage changes bewteen cat releases.
 
I know for myself a MSI 7870 Twin Frozr III I need power slider 15-20% and 1.250 volt on slider to do 1146Mhz gaming stable, max I can push is 1186Mhz 1.268v for gaming, bitcoin I can do 1226 Mhz at same voltage. The reviwers for most cards must get really great cards(cherry picked) to be able to do 1150+ at stock voltage. Or have the V2 of the cards that use better caps/vreg. stock voltage I can do maybe 1130 or so but can do memory at around 1400 without issue.

Thing I have always found funny, and have noticed this with my Radeon 6870 as well, even though there is voltage control, it seems software bound soley, as in, even changing the voltage it still reports the standard voltage, which doesnt help when the card changes its clock to low 3d as it will use the lower voltage and sometimes carsh because the voltage doesn`t always change the way it should and the spikes seem to cause the driver to quite responding and reset, usually causing artifacting and requiring reset.

I know for my 7870 this doesn`t seem to happen near as often, but I have noticed the spikes still there, sometimes its droop/drop are insane, I suppose this could be an issue, and maybe why some of us get insane overclocks, and others do not, voltage is not very stable hence, more crashes or inability to get high clocks without alot of voltage. Trial and error, but I think maybe the makers need to do a more hardware bound overvolting support that maybe could make this less an issue?
 
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