What is Your 6950 Overlocked To?

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PC_User

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I have had my 6950 running at 850/1325 and stock volts (1.1v) for some time now. Now that BF3 is out, I was somewhat tempted to try and run it at "ultra" settings.

However, when I increased my overclock from 850/1325 to 875/1350, I didn't really notice an increase in fps - maybe 1 or 2 frames max. If I keep the settings on high (+2x AA MSAA), I get about 30-34 fps. I'm thinking of just leaving it at 850/1325 because it has been stable at those speeds since day 1, but will consider 875/1375 if that is a noticeable improvement.

Any reason why increasing the overclock did not yield extra fps? What are you guys using as your overclock?
 
At a certain point in the overclock process your going to reach a point where your going to exceed the driver controlled power consumption of your card. At that point AMD powertune will throttle your gpu clock down and up to keep it within that TDP. This will affect your performance quite a bit. In some cases you were better off not overclocking at all.

I'm not saying this is why you only got 2 more fps or that this even happened I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that.

If your interested in maxing your performance on that card the first thing I'd do is enable AMD overdrive and set your powertune settings to +20 for your card. As for what I use to overclock I use MSI afterburner. I run @ 965mhz core clock and 1415Mhz vram on both of my cards. Also have you tried unlocking the extra shaders on your card? Also another good and safe thing to do is to set the 6970 voltage of 1.175 and see how far your card can go before it loses stability. I know that reference 6950s have been used at up to 1.35V and found to be perfectly stable. 1.3v is the max I would use with the stock cooler though. I use 1.295v to achieve my overclocks stable 24/7.
 
900/1350 1.125vGPU , shader unlocked - playing at 1920x1080, everything ultra except HBAO is SSAO (10 ~ 20fps gain, but keeps some shadows), motion blur because it hurts my eyes, MLAA/deferred is set to off/disabled, post is set to low and looks fine, medium is just as playable. I've found my minimum FPS has drasticly increased as well as my average.

http://www.xitopia.net/misc/bf3 2011-10-26 19-33-15-53.png
 
Lord_Exodia said:
At a certain point in the overclock process your going to reach a point where your going to exceed the driver controlled power consumption of your card. At that point AMD powertune will throttle your gpu clock down and up to keep it within that TDP. This will affect your performance quite a bit. In some cases you were better off not overclocking at all.

I'm not saying this is why you only got 2 more fps or that this even happened I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that.

If your interested in maxing your performance on that card the first thing I'd do is enable AMD overdrive and set your powertune settings to +20 for your card. As for what I use to overclock I use MSI afterburner. I run @ 965mhz core clock and 1415Mhz vram on both of my cards. Also have you tried unlocking the extra shaders on your card? Also another good and safe thing to do is to set the 6970 voltage of 1.175 and see how far your card can go before it loses stability. I know that reference 6950s have been used at up to 1.35V and found to be perfectly stable. 1.3v is the max I would use with the stock cooler though. I use 1.295v to achieve my overclocks stable 24/7.
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Thanks for the response. Those are some rather impressive clocks! I do have shaders unlocked to 1536. I am always wary of messing with the voltage and would be satisfied if I can get it to at least 6970 clocks with stock 6950 voltage of 1.1v. My card already runs somewhat hot (mid-70s load) with the reference cooler and custom fan profile. I don't know if I should push the voltage much higher.

With regard to the powertune, do I need to set that at +20? I think at some point I read that this was optional. If I understand correctly, it will increase the TDP headroom of the video card? Currently mine is set to 0.

ziggo0 said:
900/1350 1.125vGPU , shader unlocked - playing at 1920x1080, everything ultra except HBAO is SSAO (10 ~ 20fps gain, but keeps some shadows), motion blur because it hurts my eyes, MLAA/deferred is set to off/disabled, post is set to low and looks fine, medium is just as playable. I've found my minimum FPS has drasticly increased as well as my average.

http://www.xitopia.net/misc/bf3 2011-10-26 19-33-15-53.png
Click to expand...

Thanks for providing your settings. I'll try them. I know that setting the MLAA/deferred at 2x significantly reduced fps.
 
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PC_User said:
Thanks for the response. I do have shaders unlocked to 1536. I am hesitant to increase the voltage if I can get it to at least 6970 clocks with stock 6950 voltage of 1.1v.

With regard to the powertune, do I need to set that at +20? I think at some point I read that this was optional. If I understand correctly, it will increase the TDP headroom of the video card? Currently mine is set to 0.
Click to expand...

Yes +20 is the right setting to surpass the tyranical TDP headroom governed by the driver. LOL (I'm so dramatic sometimes :D) It is optional but obviously at 0 your overclocking and end result performance will be castrated<--- err... limited. :)

You will probably be able to overclock to around 850mhz or so without throttling in your average game or stress test but above that your going to need to start bumping up powertune.

What I suggest is to bump your voltage to the extremely safe 1.175 6970 voltage and see how far you can go with it stable there. I'd only go higher on the voltage if you are just shy of your performance goals in battlefield 3 by a little. I find that around 960mhz + is the sweet spot where these cards really shine especially in higher resolutions.
 
980/1450 but the shader wouldn't unlock. :/ Oh well, probably could bump it higher but I just don't want to risk it.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Yes +20 is the right setting to surpass the tyranical TDP headroom governed by the driver. LOL (I'm so dramatic sometimes :D) It is optional but obviously at 0 your overclocking and end result performance will be castrated<--- err... limited. :)

You will probably be able to overclock to around 850mhz or so without throttling in your average game or stress test but above that your going to need to start bumping up powertune.

What I suggest is to bump your voltage to the extremely safe 1.175 6970 voltage and see how far you can go with it stable there. I'd only go higher on the voltage if you are just shy of your performance goals in battlefield 3 by a little. I find that around 960mhz + is the sweet spot where these cards really shine especially in higher resolutions.
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No risk from just setting powertune to +20 by default? It works fine with no throttling at 0 but I may need to set to +20 if I decide to overclock further.

I did turn off deferred anti-aliasing in Battlefield 3 and my fps jumped by over 10 from ~29 to about 43. My eyes can't really tell the difference so I guess I'll just keep it off.
 
PC_User said:
No risk from just setting powertune to +20 by default? It works fine with no throttling at 0 but I may need to set to +20 if I decide to overclock further.

I did turn off deferred anti-aliasing in Battlefield 3 and my fps jumped by over 10 from ~29 to about 43. My eyes can't really tell the difference so I guess I'll just keep it off.
Click to expand...

If your not throttling don't adjust it. Just like you said though, if you plan to overclock further just keep in mind that it's recommended to then use it. Post process FXAA has the image quality of 4X MSAA or slightly better. It does a really good job, you'll be hard pressed to find a difference in quality. It's mostly on thin things (mostly vertical) that deferred does a better job from what I've seen.
 
905/1375 at 1.15v for a modest OC because as you've said, it doesn't make huge difference in FPS but everything adds up. These Cayman cards are really sensitive to temperature. It seemed stable at I believe 915 core with 1.15v after an hour of stress testing but over time I got random crashes and lowering it seemed to fix it.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
If your not throttling don't adjust it. Just like you said though, if you plan to overclock further just keep in mind that it's recommended to then use it. Post process FXAA has the image quality of 4X MSAA or slightly better. It does a really good job, you'll be hard pressed to find a difference in quality. It's mostly on thin things (mostly vertical) that deferred does a better job from what I've seen.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'll keep it at 0 for now and will increase if I experience throttling.

Are you saying that the anti-aliasing post is just as good as the anti-aliasing deferred? If so, I'll just keep the post on high and turn the latter off. I get over 40fps with that setting.
 
915 stable on reference coolers here, +20, moderate voltage, they will mine like that 24-7, I still have the memory downclocked from the mining era

thinking about putting vga on the loop this winter
 
Yes FXAA is basically just as good as deferred 4xmsaa. Each method has their strong points. However the performance impact you get from using deferred isn't worth it in my opinion. Post process FXAA is definitely doing a good job to combat aliasing and not blur the image. HardOCP has a in depth follow up planned that will include this very subject. Brent_Justice says that he will dive into the image quality you get from either method or both at the same time and the performance impact of all 3 scenarios.

I'd just try using post process on medium or high and call it a day with AA in the game unless of course you have a monster golliath of a system and can run all of that while having minimums that never go under 60fps. In that case turn on all the bells and whistles regardless.
 
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