Hey you guys, quick question:What's the best way to overclock a Radeon 6950? I've read A LOT about it on the web to get the best overclock.
I've read about the 2x 6pin connectors which are different from the 1x 6pin and 1x8pin of the Radeon 6970.Apart from that, both cards are identical appearantly. I've heard stuff about diff mem timings.
So far, the best I've achieved is to get my radeon to work around 890 mhz and 1390 mhz speeds. With the unlocked shaders.I get a great performance in most games. But I'm tryin to get ready for the future. I might go crossfire soon, but for now, I've heard so much weird stuff about the radeon 6950 cards that I'm a bit confused.I hear some people install the ASUS bios in order to get ' smart doctor' software workin their card.
I got the sapphire 4890 1gb card. I tried to use rivatuner to overclock the hard. The best i got is 920 core and 1080 mem. It crashes sometimes and crysis warhead sometimes doesn't load properly during level load. How can i get it stable. Btw, when you do a the stress test with furmark. How long do you stress test it for before you make any frequency changes? Do you do it on the fly? The Theory of Poker Applied to No-Limit now available. For those of you here in Las Vegas, The Theory of Poker Applied to No-Limit by David Sklansky is now available at Gambler’s General Store/ GAMBLER'S BOOK CLUB in downtown Las Vegas.
I've seen these CRAZY speed limits in 'smart doctor' which seem to go around 2000 mhz sometimes and I was like 'what the heck'. Surely this is not achievable with a 6950 with 1.175 max voltage. Then I've read that some people get 1.3v using the 'ASUS' configuration I just mentionned.I'd like a few pointers please. Feel free to direct me to a RELEVANT web link if you ever have some reading suggestions. To mod original 6950 BIOS to have unlocked shaders, look here:To bypass CCC limits look here:To get MSI AB that works with 6950, look here:There are many concerns that the 6970 BIOS may be risky.
You can take the risk, or simply unlock the shaders which seems to most to be more risk free.Smart Doctor is mainly to remove Catalyst Limits, which the RacerX tool will do, I'd recommend A/Burner to OC after bumping limits with RacerX tool.I personally don't like tampering with voltage because of lifespan concerns, so if you look at my specs, you will see my OC so far on stock 6950 voltage (1.1V). Some are getting better, some worse.Hope that helps. For a start, not all video cards are good for overclocking. Some are just better then others, ( im sure you already know this just making sure )i use Afterburner for all my video card overclocking needs, it will usualy allow you to tweak the volts as well as frequency.i would never touch the memory timings on a video card, the clock rate however is fine to overclock.as for the Asus bios, i assume it just lets you move the sliders further, it will let you set the core clock to '2000' MHZ. But it will instantly crash at that speed. What it does let you do however is move beyond the limits if your software doesnt let you overclock past say 850mhz.
(if the slider max's out there)just be careful with Volts and heat, both of witch can damage or kill your hardware. I dont know the max safe volts of your card, but try to keep temps below 95c. The further down the temps the better.
Thx guys for the info. It's just that even with unlocked shaders and overclocked (a little bit) radeon 6950. I still get around 40-50 FPS at Very high settings with 2xAA (in dragon age 2). Which is good. I already have GPU-Z but I don't know what RBE is. I'm decent at overclocking everything else in my computer, but I just caught up with the graphical technology lately when I built my new rig with the 6950 in it.What would be the exact steps:Use GPU-Z to dump the BIOS? What does that involve?
And how do I do it?After that, what method am I to use with RBE?I have this impression I might be gettin instabillity because of my BIOS but it also might just be because of my actual overclock. After getting the unlocked shaders, it is a tedious job to find the exact Mhz/Mhz speed that provides both performance and stability without excessive heat. Unfortunately, as others have pointed, these cards can be a bit of a pain sometimes to dial in due to internal throttling.Also, once you hit a certain point, higher clocks may be 'stable', but won't really net any more performance, just added heat.
I've even seen the occasional drop in score with higher clocks. A voltage bump can help that sometimes though.Your best bet is to choose several different benchmarks, plus a couple of games, and start keeping track of scores/fps.So far I've run this 6950 to 980/1475, (1.25v) but I find that for the most part, 925/1350 (1.2v) works well and is plenty fast.I do use AB to set my custom fan profile though and don't have CCC running at startup.
My idle is about 39, with max temps at 55ish when gaming.Oh, and so far RBE will only adjust voltages, don't mess with clocks or fan stuff. You can definitely do overclocking with RBE as well, but do it with software (ex. MSI Afterburner) first, find out what your good settings are, then edit your BIOS to those settings with RBE, and flash it. Then you don't need any software anymore, the card will be overclocked by default. This method is nice, but more dangerous than software overclocking since changes made are semi-permanent.
(Changes are permanent so long as you don't re-flash the original Bios to the card; which is also why you should always keep a copy of the stock BIOS if you ever do any tinkering with BIOS flashing of GPUs). @: you need to actually take the advice given to you, these guys know what they're talking about.RBE =AB = MSI AB =Also, I think you might be sort of looking at unrealistic expectations out of your card. You want to play DA2 without a serious performance hit with high AA? That might be asking a bit much out of your product there.
Alternatively though, try disabling AA in the game, the open CCC Gaming Enable Morphological AA. As I understand it, that gives the equivalent of SSAA x4 with a much lower performance hit, so it might work better for you.A simple way to see what BIOS you have is to check the default clock of the card in GPU-Z, if it is 880Core & 1375Mem, then it's 6970, if it's 800Core & 1250Mem, it's 6950, if shaders are 1536, shaders are unlocked, if less, then they're locked.To answer your question about why it takes less voltage to get a higher clock on 6970, that's probably because the 6970 GPUs are higher binned than 6950 GPUs. As slyfox2151 said, 'not all video cards are good for overclocking. Some are just better then others.' To answer why it's good to use AB, ie, MSI Afterburner; it's because with AB you can set a heat-to-fanspeed curve that will increase the speed of your fan automatically according to the temperature of your GPU.@, your temperatures are quite stunning to me too. Our idles are the same, but your max temps are the equivalent of when I play videos in KMPlayer (which uses GPU acceleration).
I level out at 65°C max when gaming, but with taxing things like Kombuster, I hit 67°C. Thank you guys so much for all the info. As you might have noticed. I'm no expert with the Graphical aspect of overclocking. I'm far better with everything else overclocking. I had some catching up to do.Thx for your patience. I'm about to Reflash my card back to its original bios.
Then I will proceed to unlocking the shaders (without flashing in the 6970 bios) which I believe cause the card to try and use the 6970 mem timings on the card. WHICH I BELIEVE is the reason for all my abnormal heat.Keep in mind tho that Dragon Age 2 seems to be making my card overheat much more than other games. Most of my games will reach the 60ish, and that is with the fan at 50% (set to man in CCC)Once I have my shaders unlocked I will be installing RBE and either trixx or AB MSI to get that fan curve you guys are talking about. If I am correct, once I have done all this, I should be able to up the voltage of the card a little through RBE.
What about my mhz/mhz???Should I play with those in CCC, even when RBE and trixx or AB MSI are running. Or am I to use another 3rd party app to play with the speed of the card???what will CCC overdrive look like if I only unlock the shaders? Alright, I've got some news and would need a little bit of step by step info for the next partI've sucessfully flashed my card back to 6950 bios.
Then I've unlocked the shaders.I now need to understand a bit more clearly what I'm to do with RBE and Trixx (or AB MSI) in order to achieve what timoX mentionned earlier. I quote him:' So far I've run this 6950 to 980/1475, (1.25v) but I find that for the most part, 925/1350 (1.2v) works well and is plenty fast.I do use AB to set my custom fan profile though and don't have CCC running at startup.
My idle is about 39, with max temps at 55ish when gaming.Oh, and so far RBE will only adjust voltages, don't mess with clocks or fan stuff.' He says to use RBE only for voltage. But I've opened the program for the first time today. And I noticed it looks like speeds are adjustable and the 'fan curve' seems to be an option too.So what do you guys suggest? Now that I've got the correct bios and unlocked shaders, can you give me some pointers as how to use RBE and other software to get a decent overclock (which will not hurt my hardware too much)I don't mind the 'noisy' fan if it keeps my hardware from damage.
But if you think certain voltages or certain settings will damage the card no matter how high I set the fan, let me know.Again, thx a lot for all the help. Appreciate it. Thanks inferKNOXit can be as simple as just a bad paste job on the heatsinks, or like with CPU's, some OC better, some use less, some use more voltage.Also, at a certain point is the diminishing return, like any OC. Thx a lot, so just to make sure I understand what u said:My next steps are:A) change my mhz/mhz speed IN RBE.
Correct?B) Change my Card voltage in RBE (I'd like some more details on this. I'm used to CCC voltage modifications and RBE has diff voltages for like 5 diff clocks. Clock 0, clock 1 and so fourth.
Could you send me a pic of your RBE voltage configuration?)C) Set up a fan profile (or fan curve however you'd like to call it) I'll use ur screenshot.:O) thx again for thatThat pretty much covers it right?