Madshrimps Forum Madness - Chaintech Geforce FX 5900XT SA5900X Review

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Quote:

When overclocking my stock 5900 I noticed something unusual. Unlike all the other cards I have successfully overclocked, this one would not lockup, or develop any artifacts as I upped the core clock speed. I could go up to 500mhz or more, but my benchmark scores would get worse. The card was clocking faster, but getting slower! From what I understand the new nVidia drivers use the thermal diode on the GPU to monitor the temps and will "underclock" the card in case of overheating. I thought that the GPU core had allot of speed left in it, but the drivers were killing the performance by throttling back. I was actually looking for a way to disable the temperature monitoring feature of the drivers, when I came across the "flash" method we are discussing here.

I will interject a bit of my own theory here. I believe that nVidia has their driver throttling back the GPU speed at a lower temp on the 5900 than they allow on the 5950u. If this is correct, the 5950u card is allowed to run at higher temps, and the drivers will not throttle back until much later. Alternatively, the driver may look at the core clock speed and adjust performance based on the amount of overclock. I suspect both scenarios might be used together. The 5950u cards do have what appear to be larger, more efficient heatsinks. The heat protection feature most certainly will allow a cooler card to run at a higher clock speed with greater performance. This is something to consider, but we are protected against overheating none the less.

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/guides/5900_Flash_Mod/

This explains my encounter with resetting OC.

my tests

Quote:

3DMark2001

390/700: 13576
450/750: 13919
465/800: 12563

if you flash it with the correct bios you can bypass the protection :)

3DMark2001
461/770: 16993

3DMark03
same: 6303

Repeated scores are very close to each other with panel close; GPU Core idle 38C; but it's hard to read the stress temp it may have dropped a couple degrees when I get to it after the runs. It never went over 54C.

I guess it is good enough. Keep my warranty instead of flashing.:)

you can flash back:)

True that I can flash back; wondering what is the highest attainable for this card.:)

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A 5900XT will not work because it has 2.8ns memory while the 5950u has 2ns memory, trying to flash an XT to an 5950U will result in permement damage. Now aside from the dark facts, what you will gain out of this

http://forums.devhardware.com/archive/t-25300

Tried it, but it wouldn't save the oldbios ....CRC error. Found the above. Guess I'm not taking the chance. The card is running fantistic as it stands now.:)

I was talking about flashing the card to another FX5900XT bios which does not speed throttle the gpu :)

Loaded up the latest driver which sucks in OCing; 300 points lower 3DMark03. Couldn't get over 460/750. Back using the older driver.

Couldn't find other FX5900XT bios that would do the "thing". Right now it is not temp as it never goes over 55C; got to be the limiter of memory and core in the Bios.

no other FX5900XT bios' ? got to be kidding:

http://www.mvktech.net/index.php?opt...er&filecatid=4

:)

Tried Albatron and BFG no luck. Won't do it.

Anyway, this card kicks *** for the money. I have not experienced throttling back after two days of fussing around with 461/770 setting with 3DMark03 63XX and 3DMark01 SE 169XX. With this kind of scores, it's well into Ultra and 9800XT territory.

Played some Doom3 (finally), COD, CS with high to Xhigh settings. Excellent card for the price like Jmke said in the review.:)

Now what should I get next that is similar in performance/value ratio.