ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/20 00:06So, one month has passed since I last looked at this, and this weekend I finally had some time to start tweaking my GeForce GTX 590. The first thing is that my card being an ASUS version has a different bumper shader setting than cards from other brands at least by comparing with BIOS from other brands. Related to my overclocking results, using ForceWare 275.27 drivers I found that the core voltage is limited to 0.963V. I tried flashing the BIOS with different max voltage settings but Afterburner doesn't go higher than 0.963V and that seems some kind of restriction.
Using 0.963V the maximum overclock I can reach stable, meaning running Unigine benchmark on loop at widescreen resolution and extreme tesselation is 730MHz on the core. I found out a disturing problem with this setting, on Unigine I select free camera from the menu and them quicky move the subject to a place where I can get 100fps constant. Now, a few seconds later, the frame rate starts dropping to 80-90 range, some times going up to 100fps for very brief periods. I believe that this is the overcurrent protection kicking in, which does bring down the clocks somehow.
Temps at this stage are between 88-92°C and I was able to end this behaviour by using 0.9505V and 700MHz on the core. What do you guys think of this? What is the purpose of overclocking higher, if the frame rate goes down? No matter how high one can overclock, it ends up being bad for frame rates, as beyond some point the card drops to a much lower performance state. I was thinking on changing the 14 clock domain to be equal to the 15 clock domain to effectivelly disable the overcurrent protection.
And at that point run this card at 730MHz without fear of having the frame rate going down, and I did try it, but the same thing happens. And a last question, do you know of any GeForce GTX 590 being burned by running Furmark at default clocks with overcurrent protection disabled? Thanks.
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Mavke
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/20 11:55Okay, first of all just changing the maximum voltage setting won't change the actual operating voltage, as that you need to change on the voltage domain setting itself. The max setting is just to allow you to bring it higher to allow higher usage of voltage using Afterburner during overclocking. But for the GeForce GTX 590 you need to keep in mind not to bump the voltage too much or it will try to drain too much power which the system can't deliver and the overvoltage protection will kick in.
If you want to reach 730MHz you will need to increase the voltage on the 3D performance domain a little and see wat that gives but the best would be to use first Afterburner and do the same thing as it allows voltage tweaking through software. Related to the difference in shader speed, can you perhaps provide us your own original BIOS's of your GeForce GTX 590 to allow us to take a look and verify?
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finas
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/20 14:13Hi, either I didn't explain myself well or you didn't understand. On the GeForce GTX 590 BIOS the setting 1 top voltage is set to 0.925V. This means that with Afterburner, the maximum value you can set on voltage is 0.925V for which I can only reach 670MHz. What I did was to change this voltage to 0.963V and changing it to a higher value does nothing as the maximum value that is displayed on Afterburner is 0.963V since the latest drivers prevent higher values to be used.
Now, being able to use 0.963V on Afterburner I was able to overclock the card to 730MHz. The problem is that at this speed, with this voltage, the card throttles down to a lower state. I found out after much testing, that the throttling kicks in at anything more than 705MHz with 0.9505V on the core. Running it at 708MHz at the same voltage will make the card throttle. This means that it is useless to overclock to speeds higher than 705MHz or any higher voltage, as the card will actually run slower.
The only hope, is to find a way to disable the overcurrent protection that keeps the card throttling down. What I wan't to do, is to run the card at 730MHz with the higher 0.963V without the throttling. I tried putting the exact same values of the 14 and 15 core domains equal, with 730MHz values. Basically the 14 and 15 now look equal and Afterbuner shows that the default card speed is 730MHz, but the card keeps throttling. So changing the clock domain to make it equal does not solve the throttling.
My idea was that the card would throttle to the 14 clock domain, that happens to now be equal to the high performance clock domain, meaning that the card would be thinking that it was throttling when in fact it was changing to the exact same speed. Also, throttling has nothing to do with temps. Is there anything that can be done to disable throttling? Thanks!
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finas
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/20 23:53Hi guys, can anyone give me a hint as to were to find information about all the values that one can change on the clock domain page of the NiBiTor software? One of the main reasons, besides learning, is that I want to change the 2D clocks to something higher.
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/21 10:16finas wrote: Hi, either I didn't explain myself well or you didn't understand. On the GeForce GTX 590 BIOS the setting 1 top voltage is set to 0.925V. This means that with Afterburner, the maximum value you can set on voltage is 0.925V for which I can only reach 670MHz. Thanks for the clarification and when you talked about the max voltage than we see that as the max voltage possible that could ever be used for tweaking etc, which is the top voltge that anyone can set for any voltage domain. But I did get what you mean now about the voltage which is related to a particular domain. I don't know exactly what the drivers are now restricting in terms of protection against overvolting. That is a good thing cause quite a few blew up their cards by going to high on the system not able to the deliver the power needs.
The throttle kicks in when either the card it getting to hot or when the voltage, and primarily the current is not high enough to keep the card going it will throttle down. I think you hit the max you can get with yours and that all depends on the actual quality of the GPU chips itself as another one might be able to hit 730MHz at the voltage you set without throttling down. If there is not enough current to clearly make out the difference between high and low states it will always tune itself down to lower speeds no matter what, if else it will just stop responding.
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/21 10:21finas wrote: Hi guys, can anyone give me a hint as to were to find information about all the values that one can change on the clock domain page of the NiBiTor software? One of the main reasons, besides learning, is that I want to change the 2D clocks to something higher. Well we detailed the clock domains a few time already on our forums, so I am just reposting one of my previous messages. Just to explain the Fermi works with the shader clock and the core clock is always half the shader. So when you look at the clock domains you will see that the last one is always the highest clocked and that is indeed the one to tweak since this is the 3D performance mode. Now you will see several fields and the shader clock is located in the 4th box and the memory clock on the 6th box. Next to that there are some other clock settings like what we call boosted shader clock.
As indicated above the different clock speeds with the red entry the actual shader clock, and the blue entry being the boosted shader clock, which you can see somehow as the old geometric delta that was used on the GeForce 7 series. What you need to take into account is, that when you increase the shader clock, you need to increase at the same ratio this boosted shader clock. Meaning in the bove case if you want to go to 900MHz core, that is 1800MHz shader and as such keeping the same ratio as the default clock means 1889MHz for the boosted shader clock speed.
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Mavke
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/21 10:25finas wrote: Hi guys, can anyone give me a hint as to were to find information about all the values that one can change on the clock domain page of the NiBiTor software? One of the main reasons, besides learning, is that I want to change the 2D clocks to something higher. Now just related to the 2D clocks as you want to change these to something higher, do note that many have tried and from experience if you increase these too much your card will start acting up and you will get random system freezes. Sorry but that seems something that the Fermi based can't deal with or what perhaps NVIDIA intended as behavior and that is that bumping the 2D clock typically leads to issues, a slight bump works but don't try to go beyond the lower power 3D settings.
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finas
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/21 11:12Mavke wrote: I don't know exactly what the drivers are now restricting in terms of protection against overvolting. That is a good thing cause quite a few blew up their cards by going to high on the system not able to the deliver the power needs. I actually don't think it is a goog thing. On CPU overclocking, and considering that we are using a motherboard that can deliver whatever power we need without burning and that some electrical parameters can like voltage can be adjusted, the limiting overclocking factors are the quality of the that particular CPU and the temperature. And is easy to kill a processor, just give it to much voltage or don't cool it properly.
On an Fermi GPU they appear to have imposed a limit on the power drawn by the card, meaning that even if you have a chip that can do wonders, and even if you cool it properly, you wont be able to take advantage of it because there is a fixed value for power drawn that is being imposed. Anything above that is actually slower. Sure that some chips will be able to run a little bit faster at some voltage, or even consume a little less current than others, but for my experience, what this actually means, is that all cards will now run with 4-5mhz of diference between them, before the over-current kicks in. Worst than that, you have no way of telling if the card has throttled down other than actually benchmarking it at diferent speeds, and that doesn't guarantee you that the card will not throttle, even at default speeds.
CPU makers clock their chips at a speed that enables them to perform at 100% utilization, under the most demanding aplications. That is why you can overclock a cpu by 400 or 500mhz today without even touching the voltage. They are clocked so that they can run prime95 for days wihtout any problems. I'm sure they would love to clock them higher, but them there would be some that would probably fail at those demanding appllications. NVIDIA chose the other way: they clock the card at a speed past the specifications, and them throttle what they call "demanding apps" like furmark, because for some reason, for them, their cards should no be able to run those apps at full spec. And even worst now, they throtle everything.
I'm really very unhappy with this nvidia over current thing! One should be able to disable it, or at least to increase it's kick-in threshold.
Well, rants apart, thanks for your explanation on the clocks domain, Those settings ( shader clock, boosted shader clock, and memory ) I already knew about. What I would like to know are what are the other values for ( box 0,1,2,6,7, 8, 9, 10 )
Thanks alot for your time Mavke!
by the way, any idea as to why asus uses a diferent boosted shader clock than other manufacturers ?
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Mavke
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/21 12:28You might not find it a good thing, and certainly if you are certain that you won't blow up your card I would say the same but when you are the manufacturer and you are bound to what a power supply and the PCI Express interface can deliver in terms of power than you are stuck to make sure you protect that you won't draw over the limits of both. And that is exactly what is happening with these GeForce GTX 590's when you start raising the voltage, you will simply at a point go over what can be delivered in terms of power by the power supply and the PCI Express interface combined.
Related to the other boxes, we only can guess and somehow we have an indications that the first two value are related to the VPU clocks but that is not confirmed and all others are unknown and I would even believe since changing those make nu difference that they are currently useless but since nobody knows, expect NVIDIA personnel who aren't saying anything we can only guess. The important thing is we know the clocks that count and that is what we are focussing on.
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finas
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Re:ASUS GeForce GTX 590 overclock and overvoltage protection? - 2011/06/24 23:04Mavke wrote: but when you are the manufacturer and you are bound to what a power supply and the PCI Express interface can deliver in terms of power than you are stuck to make sure you protect that you won't draw over the limits of both. And that is exactly what is happening with these GeForce GTX 590's when you start raising the voltage, you will simply at a point go over what can be delivered in terms of power by the power supply and the PCI Express interface combined. Actually, the problem for the GeForce GTX 590 does not lie on the power that a system can supply. It lies on the fact that the power circuitry that feeds the chips on the card was designed below what the card can consume at maximum. The GeForce GTX 590 draws power from three sources, the PCI Express and the two 8-pin power connectors. As long as you have a power supply that can deliver the wattage needed, these sources of power are enough.
The problem is that when run at peak, even with stock clocks, the chips on the card consume more power than what the power circuitry on the card can deliver to them because they were designed below spec. And that is why it throttles Furmark even at default clocks because the card is not designed to handle the power consumption that Furmark unleashes. It's not a problem of the GPU, its a problem of the power circuitry on the card not being able to supply the wattage that they draw.
So NVIDIA really sucks, throttling the card down with no way of the user knowing about it is as low as it can get. If someone wants to trade this GeForce GTX 590 for a Radeon HD 6990 let me know. Buying this crap card was a really big mistake.
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