R9 Fury Tri-X and Fury X Vmod Guide.

Wow am I sloooooow. I promised a Fury Vmod guide in August. It is now September. But hey better late than never. This guide will work for ALL reference PCB Furys. That means any Fury X and the Sapphire Fury Tri-X and the Powercolor Fury. If you have the ASUS STRIX use this guide from Xtreme Addict. Another way to get some extra performance out of the Fury is to try unlock extra cores on it.

VRM overview
The Fury has 4 VRMs. The HBM and Vcore are controlled by the IR 3567B the AUX and 0.95V voltage are controlled by other controllers which I can't find because none of part numbers for the ICs that could be voltage controllers return anything. That also means that I won't be covering how to mod the AUX and 0.95V voltage. If you're on air or water cooling this doesn't matter. For LN2 users you'll have to figure out how to get 1.05V on the 0.95V VRM output your selves because I don't have the resources to figure it out.


DISCLAIMER: Everything past this point will void your warranty! If the GPU stops working due to you doing any of the things described bellow I am at no fault what so ever.

Modding

 Before starting with any volt mods you need a way to measure you voltages. So hook up one wire to any of the GND points, one wire the Core voltage points and one wire to the HBM voltage points. This will allow you to use a multimeter to check the voltages because software does not pick up on the increase in voltage due to volt mods. Also there is no software voltage reading for the HBM or AUX voltages. For AUX it doesn't matter. The stock voltages are 1.2V core and 1.35V HBM.


Now for the actual volt modding. The 3567B is a very very smart voltage controller. It's so smart that if you try to hard mod the power limit you end up with this and run the risk of burning the VRM. Instead just max the power slider in you overclocking software(Sapphire Trixx 5.0.0 goes upto +50% and supports HBM overclocking). To get core voltage under control hook up a 100ohm variable resistor(potentiometer or trimmer) to any of the red points and to ground. To limit the maximum core voltage to 1.8V put a 7ohm resitor in series with the variable resistor. If you want a maximum voltage of 1.5V use a 14ohm resistor. For the HBM hook up a 220ohm variable resistor use a 50ohm resistor to limit the maximum voltage to 1.62V.



Practical tips
Use a fine chisel tip for all the soldering. A needle tip will make everything much harder because the tip of the pen won't actually melt anything.

If you have a temperature regulated iron set it to 240-250C for everything except when trying to solder onto the GND pins of the PCI-e connector. Those act like massive heatsinks so I suggest you raise your pen temperature to 300C.

When you finish soldering one of the connections to an SMD component I recommend using plastidip to hold it in place. Hot glue is harder to apply and very bulky which might lead to you not be able to fit the heatsink back on the card.

Route wires from the 3567B between the PCI-e power connectors. This will hold them in place without the need for more glue/plastidip.

Some results.

Due to budget constraints I do not have 100ohm nor 220ohm potentiometers. So I improvised a dipswitch voltage controller. However they seem to be much higher resistance than the values of the resistors I used to make them. My maximum core voltage is 1.3V and with it I can run 1165mhz core clock this is a 65mhz increase over the 1100mhz that I was getting on stock volts. My maximum HBM voltage is only 1.37V and it didn't improve the HBM overclocking capabilities of my card in the slightest I'm still stuck at 570mhz HBM. So I think HBM doesn't scale with voltage on air cooling or I'm just not giving it enough voltage. Keep in mind that SK Hynix specs HBM to run at 1.2V so over volting it much more than 1.35V might not be the best idea. For the core you can run 1.3V if you keep it sub 80C and if you keep the core sub 60C you can run it at 1.4V. If you set the fans on the Tri-X to 60% you should have no problem keeping the card sub 60C. For benchmarking you can run an extra 100-150mv on top of the safe 24/7 voltage for a given temperature.


Some tips for Tri-X owners
Sapphire used some weird thermal paste on the VRM heatsinks and core. For the core do whatever you usually do when you repaste a GPU but for the VRM heatsinks you can use 0.5mm thermal pads. They will contact the MOSFETs just fine and are cheaper than the 1mm and 1.5mm thermal pads.

Tip to lower or even eliminate coil whine.

Apply hot glue or plastidip on the marked sides of the inductors. If the first time you still get coilwhine you can apply more plastidip/hotglue.

I would like to thank techpowerup.com for allowing anyone to use their PCB pics. My attempts at PCB pictures are better for making desktop backgrounds than Vmod guides:

Thank you to Cooler Master for powering this blog.