Thread: My HD7970 ... Benches and info

As I said, on your card there is an SMBUS chip which controls OCP. In order to bypass it you have to physically bypass it.

Saying you're unbiased is a lie, but if you're indeed starting to give everything a fair chance good for you.

But I didn't post here just to say that. Here is the hard OCP mod, doesn't look very difficult, hope this helps.


click for wide shot

you don't ned an OCP mod for around 1300MHz. You must realize that not all silicon is going to be the same, and some may make 1320Mhz some may not be able to do 1200MHz, it depends on the GPU really. Also going too high on the memory will decrease the GPU clock

Originally Posted by ShockG

2. 5GHz 3930K on water 24/7 wont' be feasible unless you have a C2 stepping CPU which we don't have here in SA yet and even then it's dicey

Well mine is 5Ghz using 50x100 using 1.46V
Im using a Swiftech Apogee HD 24K Gold plated limited edition cpu block, Swiftech MCP655-B, lots of UV Red tubing, XSPC Single bay res and XSPC RX360 with Push/Pull 2000rpm 90CFM Coolermaster Red LED fans.
Temps are looking good too : 73C , 71C , 59C , 65C , 69C , 72C

I don't think I'd be comfortable with that kind of voltage for 24/7 use, not on that expensive of a chip at least. Too risky to degrade/kill.

Yep, that's the best way to degrade a chip, or you may be lucky and it'll chug along at 5GHz 24/7 at that voltage but having binned a few SB-E CPU's I can almost assure you that your 5GHz 24/7 will start Blue Screening randomly out of the blue and then from there a beautiful downward spiral.

But then again you may be lucky, lots of performance at that Speed

Originally Posted by ShockG

Yep, that's the best way to degrade a chip, or you may be lucky and it'll chug along at 5GHz 24/7 at that voltage but having binned a few SB-E CPU's I can almost assure you that your 5GHz 24/7 will start Blue Screening randomly out of the blue and then from there a beautiful downward spiral.

But then again you may be lucky, lots of performance at that Speed

What would you recommend as a good 24/7 voltage and overclock to prevent degradation ?

Lots of performance, yes, but is it worth it? Dropping the clockspeed by 10 % won't be noticeable (can you tell the difference between 20 FPS and 22? What about 40 and 44? 80 and 88? Even time, can you easily tell the difference between a minute and 1:06?) yet will add plenty of life to your chip. I wouldn't pass 1.380v for extended periods.

Problem with such a clock speed and voltage is that, the other voltages you may not be tuning go up as well, like CPU PLL, system Agent, VCIO/VTT. You can tune them manually I guess, what we can't tune though is the amount of current for each of those voltages on every board. That relationship between I/V on each of those rails must be kept under control, even if CPU temps look good. The damage may be on the VRMs as that's a fair amount of voltage to regulate so (again if on auto) switching frequency may automatically adjust as well to something that in the short term is fine, but soon will start to cause spikes, possibly damaging the PWM and/or CPU.

It's tricky really, like said above. If you measure the performance in games and such you'll realize you were GPU bound long before 5GHz and you hardly need 5GHz to watch videos or when you're on the net.
However, in the strictest sense, if you are using C0/C1 and are doing 5GHz 24/7 I was wrong and indeed it is possible as you've shown