18 replies to this topic

[Bill Lumbar]

Hey guys,

I started to try and push my XFX 7970 DD 3gb card with a more aggressive OC today. I started out using the 14.2 omega driver, and CCC to push it to around 1150 on the GPU and 1525 on the ram. Every time I go past 1050 on the GPU and 1475 on the ram I get artifacts sometimes, not all the time. Anything past that for a OC and I get MWO crashing....well kinda crashes. If in game the screen goes black, and I can still hear all on Voice chat, but have go to task manager and shut down MWO and then restart and rejoin. Some times I get a graphics card driver has failed error, and it shuts down firefox, and the game just crashes out completely. Temps are not a issue, and stay below 75C all the time and avg around 60-68C even while playing MWO with the card OC'ed.

So today I uninstalled the 14.2 omega driver and restarted, and installed the 15.3 beta omega driver. I also have now installed MSI afterburner to do my Overclocks on the 7970 now. I have the card completely stable at 1103 mhz on the Gpu, and 1603 on the ram, with a 20% power increase, well....in any other game so far I have played today, other then MWO. I have ran benchmark stress testing with Intel's software on the card, I have ran benchmark performance test in Dawn of war II Retribution, I have ran benches in Aliens Vs. Predator, and several other games, and all have passed and completely stable with this higher Over clock on the 7970.

I had not up till this point run the repair tool, and made sure the clear shader cache was checked.... as I am doing that right now. Would this be a issue or the reason for problems that I have explained in this game? Anyone have any thoughts or advice on this? I am still running the repair tool right now, and waiting for it to finish.... hoping this will solve the problems I have experienced.

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 11 April 2015 - 10:16 AM.

[Catamount]

You might have to put some additional voltage into that GPU in addition to raising the power limit to get it to play nicely, though 1100 is a decent OC for the 7970. I have found that OCing in MSI Afterburner has, for some reason, sometimes left me less stable than other software such as Trixx, a result that has persisted across versions and GPU drivers.

[DjPush]

Stop overclocking. It's a stupid notion to push a piece of equipment past its normal operating design specs. On a CPU its understandable to to "OC" a little. For example: if a CPU comes as 4.0 Ghz at stock but has a Turbo boost of 4.2 or 4.4, Then its understandable to tweek the bios settings to make the chip operate at the "Turbo" mode all the time. However, Unnecessary overclocks beyond design specs only shorten the life of your equipment or destroy it. If your equipment doesnt run fast enough then buy equipment that does.

If you still wish to continue with pushing your equipment like you are then that is your prerogotive. If you wan't people to help you though you need to list your PC specs. Give the info of all your equipment.

CPU: xxxx
Motherboard: xxxxx
DRAM: xxxx
PSU: xxxx
GPU: xxxx
HDD: xxxx

yada yada yada.....

[Bill Lumbar]

DjPush, on 11 April 2015 - 02:48 PM, said:

Stop overclocking. It's a stupid notion to push a piece of equipment past its normal operating design specs. On a CPU its understandable to to "OC" a little. For example: if a CPU comes as 4.0 Ghz at stock but has a Turbo boost of 4.2 or 4.4, Then its understandable to tweek the bios settings to make the chip operate at the "Turbo" mode all the time. However, Unnecessary overclocks beyond design specs only shorten the life of your equipment or destroy it. If your equipment doesnt run fast enough then buy equipment that does.

If you still wish to continue with pushing your equipment like you are then that is your prerogotive. If you wan't people to help you though you need to list your PC specs. Give the info of all your equipment.

CPU: xxxx
Motherboard: xxxxx
DRAM: xxxx
PSU: xxxx
GPU: xxxx
HDD: xxxx

yada yada yada.....

Ha ha...Dj...not trying to be rude or anything, but I think the specs of my hardware are right below in that little blue box in my sig with the exception of my samsung SSD 500gb and the PSU is a Rosewill 750 Fortress.

While I agree with you that over clocking can be taken to far and can damage hardware I am setup for it with better then ideal conditions. The 7970 is made to OC a bit, and there is really not much danger in doing so. I find it odd that all the other games that I have played or benched so far, none of them crashes, just MWO. I have went with a steady 1065 gpu oc, and 1495 on the memory. So far, running stable and no issues in MWO with this O.C. As I said before, temps look good, and unless the ram is over heating, which I have heard some of the 7970's have had issues with this, I can see no reason's as to why it only runs into this problem while playing MWO.

IF it is the ram heating up to much, only cure for it would be to invest into a water block for the 7970 and add it to my loop.

I just wanted to know if anyone else had ran into this problem, and if they had any thing to add that might help correct it.

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 11 April 2015 - 03:46 PM.

[Bill Lumbar]

Catamount, on 11 April 2015 - 02:24 PM, said:

You might have to put some additional voltage into that GPU in addition to raising the power limit to get it to play nicely, though 1100 is a decent OC for the 7970. I have found that OCing in MSI Afterburner has, for some reason, sometimes left me less stable than other software such as Trixx, a result that has persisted across versions and GPU drivers.

Yeah that is what I was thinking also, but I would rather not add voltage to it. Many of the sites that I have read guides on was able to push the card to 1100-1200 Gpu OC, and 2000+ on the ram with out adding voltage other then the standard +20% bump in power. I have since went back to using CCC and stop using MSI afterburner to OC, and have a lower clock, but its stable ATM. I have also heard good things about Trixx, that is a saphire OC software right?

Maybe its time to sell the trusty 7970 and pick up that XFX R290X 4 gb. A 1100 over clock from 925mhz is nice for sure, but I just find it odd that every other game or stress test/bench I have ran/played has no issues with the higher overclock, and FPS are much improved in those games played, yet drop in a match in MWO.... boom, problems!

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 11 April 2015 - 03:36 PM.

[DjPush]

I used to get that with my Radeon 7850 when I used AMD overdrive to tweek it.

I also Didn't see the PC specs on your little forum tag. Sorry.

Did you change the timing on you RAM?

[Bill Lumbar]

DjPush, on 11 April 2015 - 03:49 PM, said:

I used to get that with my Radeon 7850 when I used AMD overdrive to tweek it.

I also Didn't see the PC specs on your little forum tag. Sorry.

Did you change the timing on you RAM?

Its all right man, just saying. If I could of made it bigger I would have, they have size limits ya know.

This just seems really odd to me that other games that are pretty demanding on the GPU seem to have no issues with such a high over clock.... yet MWO does and crashes. I understand the whole, "MWO is a very demanding game" and all...but come on seriously? Pushing anything past 1075 on the gpu, and 1500 on the ram gets me into troubles on this game, yet other games tested the FPS go up as they should, no artifacts or any issues at all at 1100mhz and 1600 on the ram. Just seems a bit weird

What timing on the ram are you talking about? On the GPU, yes I bumped the timing up on the GPU's on board ram to 1600 from like a stock of 1275 i think.

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 11 April 2015 - 03:58 PM.

[DjPush]

That may be the problem. I dont think RAM can be overclocked that much. Im not sure though.

[Durant Carlyle]

Every game uses the GPU and VRAM differently.

If your OC is "stable" in every game or program except one ... then it isn't really a stable OC at all. Eventually, it will glitch out in other games/programs -- it just hasn't happened yet.

There is no way to make MW:O stop doing what it does -- it would likely still crash your OC even at the lowest graphics settings. You simply have to do whatever you can to stabilize the OC (lower temps with higher fan speeds, or increase the voltage, etc), or lower the OC until it stops crashing.

Us overclockers might be disappointed that we didn't reach a certain clock speed goal, but it's better to reach a slightly lower speed and be stable rather than crash out of games...

[Bill Lumbar]

Thanks for the reply Durant, and I am thinking volts is the only way to increase the clock higher then I have at this point. Some have increased it to 1.3 volts with the 7970 and it did no good at getting the card higher. However, one site reached around 1200mhz on the core, and 2450 on the memory if I remember right. Not much point of going higher then that, they must of got a lotto card, lol. Temps are not a problem on the core, but I need to find some software that give the ram temps as well... I have heard this could be a problem with the 7970's that are not factory/stock editions. Some of the revisions have to thick of a thermal pad on the ram chips, and it has caused over heating issues on some of them.

I will live with the 1075/1495 I have stable right now, Highly doubt I will drop cash on a water block for this card, and would be better off upgrading to a 290X 4 gb or waiting for the next line up of cards to come out.

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 11 April 2015 - 07:01 PM.

[Durant Carlyle]

Yeah, I'd keep the stable OC and wait for AMD to drop their 3xx GPUs on us. Hopefully they can compete with the latest Nvidia GPUs and force prices lower all around.

I just wish that AMD would get their heads out of their azzes and give us real multi-core CPUs to compete with Intel. They're both too focused on power-saving and have been for far too long.

[Catamount]

Keep in mind that review samples are often hand-picked and tend to be really good. Most of the time it's probably not as bad as the Haswell release, where average off-the-shelf chips literally OCed nothing like anyone's review samples (Tom's did a big write up on it, though it seems things got better eventually), but don't expect to match what a reviewer gets. 1200mhz is a top-notch core OC on the 7970. I've only ever been able to get there with some additional voltage (1.2+), across multiple samples.

If you're just OCing to see how you can do, I'd call it a day where it is. If you're not happy with performance, then I'd hold out for the 390X.

[drizz786]

Hey folks, just to add my 2p,  I've found after days of tweaking and general poking at bios mb and gfx card and different oc tools that for some reason I can get my r290 to a good oc similar to review posts from 3d guru  and bench any game/ demo available on the Web and it sails through them, including haven 3d mark . But try mwo and only the smallest oc 20 to 30 hz on either gpu or vram and it throws a fit. This does however vary with patches so my theory is give your cpu a push as this has the best results ( for me)  gfx oc does not seem worth it. Bear in mind the gfx engine is doing a lot of work it was not intended to do so I suspect that is the main reason mwo likes cpu oc's better. Entirely my own thoughts just would save you the time I spent tinkering.

Edited by drizz786, 11 April 2015 - 07:52 PM.

[Bill Lumbar]

What I am now finding rather odd is under my install of Windows 10 PT build 10041 the 7970 is hitting higher clocks and is stable in MWO now. I have no crashing, no artifacts going on, and everything is smooth as butter now. I haven't pushed past 1100mhz on the GPU, or past 1575 on the ram yet, but it is more then I am getting in Windows 7.

[Goose]

Different drivers, for card and/ or chipset?

I've heard, once or twice, getting way from the Win7 task scheduler was a big deal …

[Bill Lumbar]

Goose, on 12 April 2015 - 10:10 PM, said:

Different drivers, for card and/ or chipset?

I've heard, once or twice, getting way from the Win7 task scheduler was a big deal …

I have used the very same drivers as on my Windows7 build.... however, they are the 8.1 64 bit Windows drivers for the motherboard, The 7970 is the 15.3 beta driver, and it is for Windows 8.1 also.

[Bill Lumbar]

This is really rather odd guys, I downloaded Asus OC software, and have the 7970 at 1100mhz on the gpu, and 1475 on the ram, 11% power boost and In Windows 10 new build and I am not getting any artifacts, tearing, or crashes out of the game so far. My volts are locked at this time @1.175 and unless I change the Bios on the card I do not think I can adjust the volts. It would seem that XFX has decided to lock the settings on this version of the card, the one with 2 DVI ports out on it. It has the new PBC and from what I am reading, it is a PITA to flash. I believe it can be done, but it will take some work to do.

Something is jacked up though, as I said before, every game that I have run, and any benchmarks I have done didn't have any problems with the higher OC, 1100/1575 until I played MWO. However, I was under Windows 7 with that OC, and using CCC at first, and then installed MSI after burner to OC the card. I haven't tried Saphires OC software yet, Asus seems to be doing just fine so far.

[Goose]

Bill Lumbar, on 13 April 2015 - 07:54 AM, said:

… however, they are the 8.1 64 bit Windows drivers for the motherboard, The 7970 is the 15.3 beta driver, and it is for Windows 8.1 also.

I think you just said "I've got Win8.1 drivers installed in my Win7 build."

[Bill Lumbar]

Goose, on 13 April 2015 - 10:18 AM, said:

I think you just said "I've got Win8.1 drivers installed in my Win7 build."

Yes.. . I guess that would be a "different driver".... same versions for my hardware, just the Windows 8.1 64-bit version. I guess the only way to find where the problems is by installing Asus OC tuner in Windows 7 and apply the same settings for the OC. IF no issues occur then I would say its a problem/issue with CCC and MSI after burner.

EDIT.... Sorry if that is what I said or it sounded like... I have the correct Windows 7 drivers installed for Windows 7 64-bit. I did not install 8.1 drivers for the Windows 7 install.

Edited by Bill Lumbar, 13 April 2015 - 11:01 AM.