Sapphire HD6950 1GB - Temperatures and Overclocking

[vickybat]

Regarding fan speed at least during winter we can keep it at default levels. I guess like Patna, Amritsar also gets very cold.

Even in summer you can use default. Max 60% or at best 70% under heavy overclock but not for prolonged usage. Not at all recommended using at 80% or beyond.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

Yeah, Dirt3 bench please and vantage, if possible.

Plus 3dmark11, heaven, avp, re5, metro 2033, crysis2. This should suffice.

ok. i dont have avp and metro though.

Regarding fan speed at least during winter we can keep it at default levels. I guess like Patna, Amritsar also gets very cold.

yeah.

Jaskanwar, you should mention the FPS differentials you are getting. Stock vs. OC. At least 3-4 games.

ok. tomorrow i will put them.

 

[asingh]

Even Crysis 2, and any of the latest COD series.

 

[SlashDK]

@Everyone
Umm... I know that this may sound a nooby question but why do you guys over clock such high end PC's? Faster proessors = better for productivity but what about graphics? With the exceptions of a few games such as Crysis2 DX11, Metro2033 etc. and compute what difference does it make? I am personally running my Athlon ii x4 635 under clocked and undervolted and my HD 6850 is underclocked too. Sorry if this sounds amateurish but please clarify.

 

[Skud]

ok. i dont have avp and metro though.



yeah.



ok. tomorrow i will put them.

You can download the RE5 and AVP benchmark tool from net. No need for full games.

@Everyone
Umm... I know that this may sound a nooby question but why do you guys over clock such high end PC's? Faster proessors = better for productivity but what about graphics? With the exceptions of a few games such as Crysis2 DX11, Metro2033 etc. and compute what difference does it make? I am personally running my Athlon ii x4 635 under clocked and undervolted and my HD 6850 is underclocked too. Sorry if this sounds amateurish but please clarify.

FUN!!! Also it gives an idea how far you can stretch your hardware.

 

[mukherjee]

N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC Overclocking | bit-tech.net

Man You've to refresh your knowledge Bit-tech guys has overclocked it to 975mhz without overvolting & with overvolting 1020mhz.

MSI N560GTX Ti Twin Frozer II review

974mhz without overvolting.

Wastage of money on sapphire 6950 1gb.

Refrain from personal attacks.

 

[Skud]

I guess the Sapphire card is not minding at all.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

Even Crysis 2, and any of the latest COD series.

asingh what are temps of your oced 4890s? and have you fixed fan profile to a value?

 

[rchi84]

Hi Jas

Nice OC. but don't know why you didn't use afterburner to OC as it allows you to OC, monitor temps and adjust fan profiles all at once Once you enable unofficial overclocking, it allows you to up the GPU voltage too, if you need it.

What are the stock volts on the Sapphire? If it's like mine (around 1100 mv), then you should be able to get it to 850/1300 atleast, without any problems.

Memory OCing is not really needed, imho, as it only gives you a small boost. So you can keep the memory at 1250.

Kombustor is Furmark with MSI branding, so don't know why it gets a negative. The only thing is that both Nvidia and AMD throttle the GPU when they detect you're running Furmark/Kombustor.

Try OCCT. It's a very good test to check for memory artifacts. Run it on complexity 8, at 1080 fullscreen. It's usually very good at letting you know when Memory OC is unstable, as it overwhelms the DDR5 memory error correction.

Based on personal experience, Metro 2033, Crysis 2, Witcher 2 and Assasin's creed brotherhood (surprisingly punishing on my card at 1080 with 8xAA, esp when you sync with viewpoints) would be good indicators of stability.

If you can play crysis 2 for fifteen minutes, without getting a "AMD Driver has stopped responding" message, your OC is stable.

Play with the afterburner fan profile, which is very useful, but remember to close the Powertune window in catalyst, which doesn't work when afterburner is running, anyway.

 

[vickybat]

^^ I think there should be a general ratio between core clocks and memory clocks. Simply because when you increase the core clocks without significantly increasing the memory clocks, the gpu performs faster operations per clock but when tries to fetch from the memory, gets slower due to lesser clock rates.

So it renders faster but fetches data relatively slower and in the end, you don't see a significant overall performance increase.

So i think, if you increase the core clocks to lets say 10mhz, memory clocks should also be incremented by the same value so that the overall ratio is maintained.

This is completely my thinking but i could be wrong here.

 

[rchi84]

Hi Vicky

Nahin yaar. it doesn't work that way. Plus, GDDR5 is fast enough as it is. The problem is that with GDDR5 there's a built in error detection which tries to compensate for memory corruption. So, you wouldn't notice artifacts even when you've crossed the memory OC limits, because the card is compensating and correcting for it.

OCCT is useful for this. When you run the torture test for ten minutes, by keeping the core on stock and upping the memory in small increments, you'll notice minor improvements. The minute you start losing FPS at high clocks, you know you've reached the limits of your memory chip and the card is slowing because it has to correct memory errors.

But even at 1375, the difference in fps from 1250 was only 6 fps. But OCing the core gave me a bigger boost of more than 20.

 

[Skud]

Hi Jas

Nice OC. but don't know why you didn't use afterburner to OC as it allows you to OC, monitor temps and adjust fan profiles all at once Once you enable unofficial overclocking, it allows you to up the GPU voltage too, if you need it.

What are the stock volts on the Sapphire? If it's like mine (around 1100 mv), then you should be able to get it to 850/1300 atleast, without any problems.

Memory OCing is not really needed, imho, as it only gives you a small boost. So you can keep the memory at 1250.

Kombustor is Furmark with MSI branding, so don't know why it gets a negative. The only thing is that both Nvidia and AMD throttle the GPU when they detect you're running Furmark/Kombustor.

Try OCCT. It's a very good test to check for memory artifacts. Run it on complexity 8, at 1080 fullscreen. It's usually very good at letting you know when Memory OC is unstable, as it overwhelms the DDR5 memory error correction.

Based on personal experience, Metro 2033, Crysis 2, Witcher 2 and Assasin's creed brotherhood (surprisingly punishing on my card at 1080 with 8xAA, esp when you sync with viewpoints) would be good indicators of stability.

If you can play crysis 2 for fifteen minutes, without getting a "AMD Driver has stopped responding" message, your OC is stable.

Play with the afterburner fan profile, which is very useful, but remember to close the Powertune window in catalyst, which doesn't work when afterburner is running, anyway.

Actually Trixx allows you to OC over Catalyst Control Centre's clock limits without any hack. So is the case with voltage tweak. Fan control is very easy too.

And 850/1300 at 1100mV is a cakewalk with this card even with default fan control. Beyond that you really need to find hard for the sweet spot.

 

[vickybat]

@ rchi84

Didn't know about the memory correction thing in gddr5. Thanks for that.

But don't you think when we reach the memory clock limits or threshold, the error detection feature will automatically downclock the memory?

I didn't exactly get the memory corruption part. Are they like bad sectors but on a volatile memory unit?

Its obvious that upping the core clock will give a greater boost because it is involved in rendering computations.

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

Guys first stock benches. Couldnt get time for oc ones.
And in sapphire trixx when i oced yesterday, all settings were lost today. Why so?
And i downloaded 3dmark11. Only 720p is available in basic edition. Anyways when it completed, a missing file error came. No results.

So will again do oc tomorrow. Tell me about trix prob.

And rchi i get access denied when i modify the file.

And skud the stock benches for u for now -

Dirt3 with highest possible settings -
total frames - 5.720
avg - 57.32
min - 47.48

RE5 with all highest settings again -
fixed bench - 59.2
variable bench - 59.9

in BC2 with highest settings -
fps ranged from 51-60

 

[Skud]

Guys first stock benches. Couldnt get time for oc ones.
And in sapphire trixx when i oced yesterday, all settings were lost today. Why so?
And i downloaded 3dmark11. Only 720p is available in basic edition. Anyways when it completed, a missing file error came. No results.

So will again do oc tomorrow. Tell me about trix prob.

And rchi i get access denied when i modify the file.

Have you done the following in the settings:-

check "load on windows startup" and uncheck "...and restore clocks"

Also make sure Afterburner is not loading on startup and applying the clocks.

And skud the stock benches for u for now -

Dirt3 with highest possible settings -
total frames - 5.720
avg - 57.32
min - 47.48

RE5 with all highest settings again -
fixed bench - 59.2
variable bench - 59.9

in BC2 with highest settings -
fps ranged from 51-60

Those Dirt3 results are telling me I am probably utilizing 50% of graphics card's power.

 

[rchi84]

Hi Jas. Sorry can't help you out with this as I haven't used Trixx. Maybe you can try to run it in administrator mode while right clicking?

Don't have dirt 3, but for comparison, in RE5, with highest settings and on stock clocks, I get around 85 fps in the variable bench. A friend of mine who has oced his 2600k to 5.1Ghz gets 135 on the benchmark.

Edit:

The RE5 score seemed low and I checked again. Some app was forcing my CPU to downclock for some reason. I restarted and ran it again and these are my results:

*i51.tinypic.com/357irtv.jpg

I think you might be getting a bit CPU bottlenecked..

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

Skud i will do that today. Thanks.

Rchi, my fps were not at all going past 60 in both variable (area 1 - 59.9, area 2 - 60, area 3 - 59.9, area 4 - 60) and fixed benches.

Rchi u have unlocked the 6950 too.
And ur friend having 2600k?

And i get access denied when i try to save afterburner.cfg file after modifying it.

 

[Skud]

Is UAC turned on in your system?

 

[rchi84]

Hi Jas. Is Vsync turned on in ur configuration? Maybe that's why you aren't crossing 60 fps in any test.

For afterburner, try to copy contents of the cfg file to a new file in notepad and save it on the desktop with the same name. Then try to copy paste the file which will give you an overwrite screen with uac prompt. Click yes and it should overwrite the file.

Also, make sure that afterburner isn't running in the background when you are editing the cfg file. (bonus tip. If you play BF:BC2 online, make sure to kill the afterburner process in task manager, as Punk buster thinks afterburner is a trainer).

If that doesn't work, you can always run a live CD session of any linux distro and make the edits on the cfg file directly, to avoid the unnecessary fuss. I used ubuntu to do this as I faced this problem with Windows not allowing me to edit cfg files in my steam folder previously.

 

[vickybat]

Skud i will do that today. Thanks.

Rchi, my fps were not at all going past 60 in both variable (area 1 - 59.9, area 2 - 60, area 3 - 59.9, area 4 - 60) and fixed benches.

Rchi u have unlocked the 6950 too.
And ur friend having 2600k?

And i get access denied when i try to save afterburner.cfg file after modifying it.

You should turn off v-sync because it locks fps if it exceeds your monitor's refresh rate. In your case its 60hz and therefore your fps is locked to 60.

Disabling v-sync or turning it off will enable fps to rise and there's nothing holding it back now. But use it for benchmarking purpose.

Games like RE5 are nothing against a 6950 as its a powerful card. When getting 100fps, there will be screen tearing because multiple frames try to overlap each other when it crosses the monitors refresh rate. Turning v-sync on will synchronize the fps count with the refresh rate.

Hope this helps.