XFX Reference 7970 Refuses to Overvolt

I have an XFX reference AMD HD 7970. Is anyone else having trouble getting MSI Afterburner 2.2 beta 10 to overvolt successfully? When I first open AB, the voltage is read at 1.112V and not until I hit "Reset" will the slider read "1.174V." However, this is a mislabeling as the sensor still reads at ~1.11V under load. If I increase the slider all the way to 1.3V, the actual voltage only goes up to ~1.17V. Sometimes when I appy an overvolt, the voltage will spike higher to almost 1.3V, but it is immediately throttled down to 1.17V over the next 20 seconds or so (in the shape of a reverse exponential curve).

I thought this might be due to remnants of my 6950 driver/install, so I reinstalled the drivers, but same issue. I then secure erased my SSD and reinstalled Win7, but again, the same issue. I can't believe I'm the only one with this issue, anyone else having these troubles? Thanks in advance for any help/advice, it's much appreciated. :cheers:

 

Hi Dr. ,
I believe you're not the only one having those issues. What i suggest you is to set the voltage to 1.25v as example...then run any extreme benchmark like 3dmark11 or crysis 2 at highest setting while at the same time, let AB monitor the GPU voltage in background.

After completed the benches, you can check what is the max gpu voltage in MSI AB. I believe you should be getting the readings of about 1.225v-1.25v max if nothing goes wrong.

just comparing yours to mine actually .

 

I get a similar but not identical issue with my Powercolor HD7970.

Afterburner reads 1.112v as the "stock" voltage yet in game I see the voltage fluctuating from 1.03v to 1.06v. In addition afterburner itself shows 1.112v as set, yet reads only 1.087v on the log (?)

Upping the voltage to 1.2v in Afterburner gives me 1.117(ish)v in the OSD.

This seems somewhat odd although I am acutely aware that my PSU may be the contirbuting factor here (The 12v rail can only supply ~ 444w max).

 

What Powertune setting are you using? the default one (250W) ?
Have you tried to increase it (with all the risk it represents) to see if it could help?

 

Does this explain why what I "set" (in this case 1.112v) in Afterburner and what afterburner actually reads (1.087v) is different?

To hopefully explain better:

MSI afterburner voltage set at 1.112v in the voltage control section (left hand side). Log graph reads 1.087v and no higher.

In game voltage fluctuates between 1.04 and 1.087v which is explained by your quote above (Thanks for this BTW )

My main real question is why am I not seeing a fluctuation that tops out at 1.112v or why is the voltage set in Afterburner not, "mapping" so to speak, to the max voltage seen in game?

I assume this is linked to your quote above (Vdroop) and actual monitoring rather than target but it would great if you could clarify.

 

Why do you need to oc this card so much, that you need to adjust the voltage? Seems pointless. ocing to the max, without touching the voltage, seems to be good enough. NOt ocing at all is still good enough. How much e-penis do you need brO?

 

lol are you trying to fry the card already?

 

Thanks, it's good to know it's not an XFX issue and I'm not the only one :thumbup:. I have done what you described, and I'm getting ~1.21V maximum.

Same readings here. My Corsair is pretty beefy and at maximum I'm only pulling ~450W from the wall (which is probably only ~360W actual load due to the age of this PSU), but that's the thing - the power usage increases by close to 100W, but it does not pay off in the overclock. At stock volts I can run 1125MHz all day, and pumping the voltage up to 1.3V can't even get me to 1175MHz stably. I've never had a video card hit a wall like that. I'll be throwing this thing on water later today and I'll test if it's a temperature issue.

Always at +20%, and changing it doesn't seem to make a difference. I also turned off PowerPlay in AB to see if it helped, and there is no difference.

Thank you for your personal response, it's good to see this kind of support for your work. If this many questions are being posted, it might be worth it to add a footnote to the beta 10 release notes to clarify this situation (might save you some headache). As I said, I'm just amazed that there is this kind of wall to the clockspeeds, especially since temps are decent (~68C). Do you know of any multimeter read points?

I paid $550 for a tier 1 graphics card, and that thing better dance. I thought this was an enthusiast's site?

 

This is the first beta version of Afterburner who support it..

Im not really surprised they will need some tweaks.

 

Ok i see. lol.

 

It's difficult to tweak their knowledge if that knowledge is not readily available :thumbup:. At the very least, regulars here could respond to such threads with a link rather than having you have to repeat yourself. Share the burden is all I'm saying, it seems like the community would take it in stride. That said, I also understand locking it for simplicity's sake, especially since it doesn't provide any relevant information anyway. Either way, your program, I wouldn't tell you how to run it. Thank you for personally replying to my inquiry, and keep up the fantastic work. :cheers:

 

Unwinder is the man.

And I'm not sure why you're hitting a wall at 1175 mhz and 1.3v? I'm able to do 1150 mhz at stock volts (so far passing Battlefield 3 and Vantage and Black Ops, and I don't know about Witcher 2, but that at least means 1125 is rock solid for me).

However I will say this.
(Maybe Unwinder might have an idea what happened too):
I already tested my card yesterday when I got it and saw it's fully stable at 1125/1575 (passes everything so far).

The first time I installed and ran Trixx today, I noticed it instantly set the fan speed from manual (the way I had it in CCC) to automatic. Then when I clicked manual in Trixx, it was at 50% (odd that I had it at 60% in ccc). Anyway, I set it to 1150 mhz, ran BF3 and Deus Ex fine, but when I ran Vantage, there were flicking triangles at the very beginning, , which in about 10 seconds, made the entire screen completely covered with horrible, flesh eating flickering triangles of Mighty Unwinder Death. So I escaped, set the card to 1125 mhz, flickering triangles. Set the card to 1000 core mhz....flickering triangles. Set Memory to 1375...flickering triangles.

Uh..huh?
Trixx said the voltage was 1175 mv.
Okay...I put the computer into S3 sleep, then came out, set the core to 1150 mhz, and it passed Vantage perfectly like nothing had ever happened?

Then passed BF3 and Vantage again...
Frankly I have no idea what happened. It's almost like on the first run of Trixx, it set the GPU to 0.9v or something I have no idea...(wasn't monitoring real time voltages). But on future runs, everything was fine. Haven't tested after a reboot, though.

If it's still fine after a reboot then something's funky. I doubt Fraps would cause flickering triangles in Vantage?

 

Disable AMD Overdrive. Uncheck Enable Graphics overdrive. Disable ULPS in TWIXX. Now you can adjust the voltages properly. Prior I use to have +20 percent power levels, and I would get errors and crashes. AFter disabling Overdrive completely, I can now reach 1,230 mhz with 1.25voltage