OC stream aftermath

I managed 6.8Ghz on the 8320E using 1.8V.
The whole system managed this and this.

Here's a pic of the system from the end of the stream:

This was my longest stream ever at a whopping 6 hours and 43 minutes. Unfortunately the sound failed twice during the stream. You can find the entire beast in its 2 3 hour long segments up on my Youtube channel.

Thank you to Cooler Master for supporting the blog.

Live Stream on Monday

If you follow AHOC on Facebook you probably know that I've figured out what I did wrong with the R9 380. I've decided that I'm going to clean the card up and make it what I would call my ideal card. I'll be streaming this on Monday and hopefully I'll get the card to scale with voltage an I'll hopefully get it to hit 1.2Ghz like I originally wanted.

The road to voltage Fury.

So I just made major step towards making the R9 Fury volt mod guide. I have revived the R9 290X Windforce which I killed and managed to get it's VRM under manual control.

Now most of you might be sitting there going DAFUQ How does volt modding an R9 290X have anything to do with volt modding the Fury?
It's simple. The Fury and R9 290X use the same exact voltage controller. If I manage to control the IR 3567B on the 290X it makes taking control of the IR 3567B on the Fury that much simpler.

The first thing I learned about the IR 3567B is that it's pretty smart. So smart, that the damn thing will not let the card run if it doesn't sense current on the VRM phases. With most GPU voltage controllers you cut the power sensing lines and they just ignore the fact that the current reading of 0.8A is wrong and continue running the VRM like nothing's changed. Not the IR 3567B, no the IR 3567B shuts the card down if it sense 0A on the phases. So after I tore all the SMD 300ohm ISEN resistors off the card in hopes that I would remove all power limits. I ended up resoldering every single one of the damn things. However I don't have SMD 300ohm resistors and so I improvised to end up with an R9 290X that looks more like a modern art piece than a GPU.

I also managed to under volt mod the card so it ended up running at 0.56V idle instead of the 0.968V that it should idle and boot at and so naturally it didn't work. I managed to fix that too and the card now boots and runs. At least on stock voltage I haven't tried overvolting it yet because the Windforce cooler no longer fits and I've run out of Seidons to ziptie on to it(it might sound like a terrible idea but the Seidon 120V rev2.0 can keep the 290X sub 70C even with 1.4V and at 55C when running stock volts and clocks).
Either way after this volt modding adventure modding the Fury will be a walk in the park.... I hope.

PS I'm very much aware that the AMD 125W CPU heatsink can't cool an R9 290X however I needed a cooler that could keep the GPU running long enough for me to get to the BIOS and it did that so you can keep the comments about me being an idiot to yourselves thank you very much.


Thank you to Cooler Master for powering this blog by giving me a V1000 PSU.

Sapphire R9 380 Nitro Physical review

Buildzoid's GPU reviews explained

Specs
1792 stream processors clocked at 985mhz
4GB of VRAM clocked at 1450mhz on a 256bit bus
2 6pin power connectors officially supporting up to 225W
Core clock throttling temperature 85C°
1 DVI-I port
1 DVI-D port
1 HDMI port
1 DisplayPort

Cooling: 7/10

 



  














I currently don't have the equipment necessary to do proper noise testing but just ot give you an idea of the fan noise I'll tell you this. With the GPU at 0RPM my sound meter reads about 51.2dB sitting 8cm from the GPU. With the fans at 50% it reads 53 dB. At 65% it reads 59 dB. At 75% it reads 63dB and at 100% it reads 72dB. I'd recommend running the card around 55-65% fan speed since that's when the noise temperature trade off is quite reasonable.

VRM: 8/10
Core
- 5 true phases provided by an OnSemi NCP81022???
- 2 low side OnSemi 4C10N MOSFETs in parrallel providing a total of 68A per phase at 80C case temperature
- 1 high side OnSemi 4C10N MOSFET providing 34A per phase at 80C case temperature
- Unknow switching frequency
VRAM
- 1 phase
- 2 low side OnSemi 4C10N MOSFETs in parrallel providing a total of 68A per phase at 80C case temperature
- 2 high side OnSemi 4C10N MOSFETs in parrallel providing a total of 68A per phase at 80C case temperature
VAUX
- 1 phase
These VRMs kicks ass. They might not look like much but it can push up to 340A to the core at 80C operating temperature. That's enough current for the card not to burn up even above 1.5V core voltage. The memory VRM can also easily handle 68A which explains why Sapphire didn't even bother with a heatsink for it. Finally the VAUX VRM is another 68A single phase. There isn't much to improve with this VRM. Sure it could be an 8 phase on the core and a 2 phase on the other voltages but other than that the VRM setup of the R9 380 Nitro from Sapphire is good enough even for LN2 overclocking. After all at stock an R9 380 only needs about 150A for the core but this card is built for twice that.

Extras:
+1 Dual BIOS
+1 0RPM fans in idle 
+1 VRAM cooling

Overclocking
The highest I've managed to push this card to was 1110/1650mhz. The VRAM is made by Hynix and has  a stock voltage of 1.6V the core on the other hand has a stock voltage of 1.2V. The only downsides with overclocking this GPU is that there is no software voltage control support and the 20% power limit seems to be causing crashes because it's too low. The last issue is that you need to restart your system if the drivers crash because after one crash many previously stable settings will be unstable. Luckily this card uses an NCP81022 so it's quite easy to get rid of theses problems with a few simple mods and hopefully there will be software support for voltage control some time soon.

Conclusion: 18/20
I like this card. The VRM is plenty powerful even for extreme overclocking and the cooler is capable enough for gaming but also benchmarking runs with raised Vcore when run at 100%. Overall I'd say this is a very well balanced card especially considering that it's the cheapest R9 380 I could find.

Thank you to CoolerMaster for providing the V1000 PSU that was used for this review.

Streaming again this Saturday!

I'm doing another stream this Saturday. I'll be doing volt modding on the R9 380 live and then I'll do some benching with it. Also if I get lucky I will have my TEC cooled Haswell system ready in time for the stream so you might get to see that in action too. I'm going to start the stream at 5PM GMT instead of 6PM GMT however I won't be doing anything too interesting until 6PM GMT so you don't have to worry about missing out on any of the action.

GPU reviews Explained

I will not test gaming performance because there are a million and 1 other sites that do that. It's also very time consuming and if I don't test with enough different games people will complain that I'm Nvidia or AMD biased so instead I will only look at the hardware side of the GPU and how good it is for overclocking.


Here's how my scoring works:

Cooling
I test cooling by testing the difference in temeperature between the GPU and the ambient temperature at different fan RPMs. However I only score based on the maximum cooling capacity of the heatsink for now because I can't properly test GPU noise levels yet. Here's a break down of the scoring:

Delta T	Score
less than 15C°	10
less than 20C°	9
less than 25C°	8
less than 35C°	7
less than 45C°	6
less than 50C°	5
less than 55C°	4
less than 60C°	3
less than 65C°	2
less than 70C°	1
more than 70C°	0

VRM
My VRM scores are based on 2 things, real phase count and current capacity over required.

Core VRM Phases	Maximum Score
8	10
6 or more	9
5	8
4	7
3	6
2	4
1	2

Other VRM Phases	Maximum Score
3	10
2	9
1	8

VRM Current over stock	Maximum Score
100% or more	10
85%-99%	9
65%-84%	8
50%-64%	7
40%-49%	6
30%-39%	4
15%-29%	2
5%-14%	0

So if you have a GPU that has a 4 phase core VRM the highest score it can get is a 7/10 even if those 4 phases can push 100% more current than it needs at stock clocks. If you don't understand why I score in this way this article should clear up any questions.

Extras
The extras section of my GPU reviews gives GPU bonus points for features that are useful but not necessary on the card. Theses would be things like 0RPM modes, dual BIOS switches, RGB lighting or other extras that make the GPU just that much better than the others.

Conclusion
The conclusion score is out of 20. This does not mean a GPU can't get more than a 20. A GPU can get more than 20 because I do not believe in perfect. Nothing is ever perfect. So no GPU could ever score a 20. So instead 20 is a target. If a GPU gets close to a 20 or a 20 it's a good GPU. If it gets more than a 20 then it means that it offers much more than what I would require. To get a 20 you just need a good cooler and good VRM because that does in fact make for a very good GPU. To get over a 20 you either need a whole slew of extra features like BIOS switches, backplates, RGB lighting, voltage read points.... or to get 10s on cooling and VRM and then have only 1 extra feature. Personally I love extra features however I do not know what kinds of extra features I want until I get them so the maximum score is opened to accommodate that.

Doing another live stream tomorrow.

Same time as the last one. 6PM GMT. I'll be overclocking the 7870K, explain how VRMs work and if things work out you'll get to see the GTX 590 boot up for the first time in a year or I'll just mess around with the R7 260X some more. As always you're encouraged to ask questions about overclocking.

The link to my twitch is towards the right corner of my blog's page.

Overclocking Comic 1

So yesterday on stream I said I would put out a graphical version of the why you shouldn't overclock a time machine joke.

Well I deliver so here it is for all my readers to cringe at:

3AM stupidity and Livestream Aftermath

So I've listening to way way too much Limp Bizkit recently and since everyone liked me more when I was less serious during the stream here's more stupid but in pure audio form. It's a spin off the rhyme for Limp Bizkit's song Why Try. Link

Oh and here are the lyrics.

Why try

this chip's gonna fry

Everybody knows

It's gonna fucking die

Sendin it's smoke

strait to the sky

But none of us here

are gonna fucking cry

I got no LN2

So I wonder what it'll do

when I push 2 V to the core

It'll make ma chip into silicon gore

But that's the cost of an overclocking war

Yeah they're bad but then again what did you expect from me at 3AM.


Post Stream Damage Analysis
 
The 3960X did survive the live stream. On the other hand it's ability to run 5Ghz on "safe" vcore is probably gone. So now it's running 4.8Ghz. Also the IMC is throwing up graphical glitches. So I'm probably going to have to under clock my RAM to 1866 8-9-9 or something like that on 1.6V.

The R7 260X. Well it's not dead but I haven't checked if the core is degraded because my 3960X is more important to me.

But one good thing did come from the 4 hours of computer madness. I have the first place for 3D mark Vantage. I just hope that the guy I beat doesn't read my volt mod guide and push his card to 1.4Ghz core. Then there would be nothing I could do since he has a 5960X and I have a poor old 1 legged and 7 fingered 3960X which has seen way more voltage than any Sandybridge-E CPU should ever be allowed to and survived all of it.