Sunday, November 13, 2016

Physical Review: XFX RX 480 GTR

Thank you to XFX for giving me the GPU.






























The backplate adds rigidity and is separate from the main heasink so it's not necessary to remove both if you want to get to the front of the PCB. It does not help cool the PCB but the holes over the VRM section stop it from causing unnecessary heat build up in the VRM area.







Specs
2304 stream processors clocked at 1338mhz
8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 2000mhz on a 256bit bus
1 8pin power connector
Core clock throttling temperature: 89C°
1 HDMI port, 3 DisplayPorts, 1 DVI

Physical Specs
length: 280mm
width: 124mm
height: 2 slots


Cooling

The noise measurements were taken 20cm away from the card on an open air test bench.
The GPU was kept under load by the Graphics Test 1 from 3Dmark Firestrike running windowed using the regular preset windowed at1440x900p with 8xMSAA.
The OC test is 1420Mhz core with +50% power limit +100mv using sapphire Trixx.
I test from the lowest fan speed to the highest this means that I actually wait for temperatures to come down this prevents me from getting low temperature measurements by taking measurements too early.

Notes:

Both the Kryonaut and stock thermal paste ended up hitting the thermal throttle of the card which is 90°C which is why they both ended up with identical Delta T in the graph.

An important thing to note is that due to the way the GTR's heatsink dumps hot air you will want to put some aiflow in front of the card's fans or they will end up re-using air that already went through the heatsink which leads to sub optimal thermal performance. If you have good case airflow this should be none issue. If you're not sure I recomend that you try playing with fan placemenets a little. If you don't want to mess with airflow you'll have to live with the noise of higher fan speed because as far as I know all the custom 480s have the same problem and the reference card is really really loud if you want get some real OCing done.

I think the heatsink is quiet up to about 55% fan speed then again I have a pretty high tolerance for noise since I like to use 2000RPM fans for pretty much everything.


VRM


Core
- 6 phases controlled by an IR 3567B(running at 304KHz)
- 1 low side IRF6894 MOSFET per phase
- 1 high side IRF6811 MOSFET per phase 
- 200KHz up to 2MHz
- 366A, 1.5V @ 125°C and 304KHz switching frequency
- 505A, 1.5V @ 100°C and 304KHz switching frequency

VRAM
- 1 phase controlled by APW8722A (fixed 600KHz frequency)
- 2 low side SM4373 MOSFET
- 1 high side SM4377 MOSFET
- 36A, 2V @ 125°C and 600KHz switching frequency
- 61A, 2V @ 125°C and 600KHz switching frequency

AUX
- 1 phase controlled by APW8722A (fixed 600KHz frequency)
- 1 low side SM4373 MOSFET
- 1 high side SM4377 MOSFET
- 40A, 1.5V @ 125°C and 600KHz switching frequency
- 67A, 1.5V @ 125°C and 600KHz switching frequency

For the Vcore VRM XFX opted to go with the  the IRF6811 and IRF6894. These are the same FETs you would see in the VRM of a Fury X. The GTR also has 6 phases. Which is the same as a Fury X. The end result is that with the default switching frequency of the 304KHz the XFX RX 480 GTR has the most powerful VRM of any RX 480. With 366A available even at 125°C the GTR is capable of handling pretty much any overclocking you might want to do on it and it will do it without even needing a heatsink on the VRM as long as you give it some airflow.

The VRAM and AUX VRMs are or on par with what you would see on most other RX 480s.The APW8722A has a fixed switching frequency of 600KHz(+/-10%) so both the AUX and VRAM should get rather clean power. Both offer plenty of power as the RX 480's memory system runs on about 35W at stock.




Extras:

Dual BIOS
0RPM fans in idle 
VRAM cooling plate
Hard swap fans











 

Conlusion

I love the RX 480 GTR. It offers a very strong Vcore VRM perfect for any type of overclocking you decided to go for. It's also one of the few RX 480s with a BIOS switch. Which I think is a must have for anyone into BIOS modding(I am). The heatsink may not be the most powerful one I've ever seen however it is perfectly capable for both 24/7 usage and benchmarking runs. My only concern with the card is that the Vcore VRM pulls half it's power from the 12V pins of the PCI-e slot. At stock clocks this is not an issue however when you really push an RX 480 the power draw goes through the roof and that could lead to a burn out 24 pin connector if you are running several RX 480 GTRs. But that's really only an issue for me since I'm toying with idea of doing a 4 way RX 480 benching session.



















If you like the content you see on AHOC please donate to my Patreon so that I can make more/better content.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

OC Review: The Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming


The buying of a new 990FX motherboard for gaming right now is the height of stupidity. So while this board does offer bells and whistles like Killer Ethernet, M.2, USB 3.1 and an upgraded audio section I will ignore them since these features change absolutely nothing about the fact that 990FX is terrible platform for everything except benching AM3+ CPUs. While this is a "gamer" focused board is does also offer some overclocker goodies like post code LEDs and onboard buttons. As such I'm hoping for it to be a strong alternative as a benching board to the 990FX Sabertooth R2.0 and Crosshair V Formula-Z both of which actually lack some key overclocking features that this board offers. It also helps that Gigabyte's GA-990FX-Gaming comes in at a significantly lower price than the Sabertooth and the Fomula.

VRM






CPU VCore
- International Rectifier 3564 4+1 phase controller
- 4 phases using IR doublers to make 8

- low side Renesas K0393 rated at 40A @ 25C°(ambient)
- high side Renesas K03B7 rated at 30A @ 25C°(ambient)
- 680nH Inductors
- 12 5K rated 6.3V 560uF capacitors
- 200KHz to 2MHz 
- large VRM + NB + PCH heatsink with 2 heatpipes
CPU NB
- 1 phase using a doubler to make 2
- Renesas K03B7 rated at 30A @ 25C°(ambient)
- 200KHz to 2MHz 
- shares main heatsink
RAM
- 2 true phases
- Same MOSFETs as CPU core - No heatsink
- Unknown minimum to unknown maximum KHz

Verdict: 7/10
The VRM on the 990FX-Gaming is strong offering 320A to the core and 80A to the CPUNB as long as you keep the VRM cool. On LN2 that is not a problem as the LN2 pot will be cooling down the entire motherboard. However on air and watercooling the VRM will need some extra cooling because during my short testing with minimal airflow the VRM heatsink was reaching into the 90s with core voltage at 1.55V. Direct airflow from a fan quickly got the temperatures under control however without it I'd expect the IR 3564's OTP to kick and either throttle the CPU or shutdown the VRM. So if you plan to bench this board with an air or water cooler I recommend you stick a fan on the VRM heatsink(which recommend for most AM3+ boards anyway). You might also want consider attaching some small heatsinks on the back side of the PCB in this area:


BIOS
Maximum Voltages: 
- VCC: 2.3V
- CPUNB: 2.1V
- VDDR: 2.1V
- HTlink: 1.8V
- PCIe: 2.435V
- PLL: 3.135V
- NB: 1.735V 
- 5 Vcore LLC settings
CPU:
- NB clock from 400 to 6300
- 1 core per CU mode as well as 2 4 and 6 core mode
DRAM:
- XMP Support
- All timings and settings available
- Supports per channel timing settings
- maximum ratio of 10.66X for 2133mhz at 200mhz FSB
 Extras:
- core unlocking on Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs 
- 8 onboard BIOS profiles and option to store profiles on USB stick or SATA drive
Verdict: 9/10
The BIOS uses the standard Gigabyte layout. All the voltage limits are high enough that even with LN2 cooling you can kill anything and everything you could install on this motherboard. The VRM settings however are a little lack luster. There are no switching frequency, response time or current limit settings like you would find on an ASUS board and you only have LLC settings for the core voltage. The core voltage LLC settings are also pretty bad with Everything but the medium and extreme setting dropping far too much voltage to be useful. The medium setting is perfect for daily usage and even benchmarking since it idles at the voltage you set and drops only 20mv going under load. The extreme LLC setting on the other hand provides a huge amount of voltage boost going under load and as such is useless for daily use and I wouldn't use it even when benchmarking just because of the 80mv voltage spread it has. Memory overclocking on the 990FX-Gaming is on the tedious side especially when pushing above 2133mhz as the board does not have a 12x ratio. So in order to get any memory clock above 2133mhz you need to start messing with the FSB. That's not really a major issue if the board showed you the impact of FSB on the NB and HT link speeds but it doesn't so regardless of your FSB setting you will only ever see the NB ratio * 200. Of course you need to run your NB above your memory clock so you just need to use the 11x NB ratio when using the 10.66X memory ratio but it would still be nice to see what the actual NB speed is going to be. Other than that memory overclocking on the board works perfectly well and the board recovers from crashes quickly without trashing your settings so you don't even have to save overclock profiles every time you change something even though I do recommend doing that just in case the board doesn't manage to recover properly from an extra bad mix of settings that require a BIOS wipe. Overall the BIOS on the 990FX-Gaming has everything I want and need when overclocking and is easy to navigate after you get used to Gigabyte's layout.

Air Testing Results:
Max RAM speed (FX 9590 + 1 4GB stick): DDR3-2603 13-16-16-36-2T 1.75V
PSC best settings(FX 9590 + 2 2GB sticks): DDR3-2500 8-12-8-28-2T 1.83V
1600mhz low timings(Phenom II X2 555BE): 1600 5-7-5-18 1.9V
Max FX 9590 validation clock 2 cores with 1.65V: 5222mhz
Max CB11.5 core clock with 1.55V: 4950mhz
Max FSB: 320mhz
Verdict: 9/10
Gigabyte may only rate the board to do 2000mhz on the RAM and the highest RAM multiplier is only 10.66x however with a bit of tweaking I got the RAM as high as 2603mhz. More is probably possible however with AM3+ compatible CPUs your NB clock needs to be equal or greater than the RAM clock and as such maximum frequency ended up limited by the North bridge which needed to be on a 11X ratio to stay ahead of the RAM speed. This is not ideal as it forces your NB clock to be a few 10s of mhz higher than the RAM speed which makes you run into NB stability problems that much sooner.
My FX9590's Norhtbridge showed just how bad it is when I did my PSC testing. The kit is capable of doing 2600 8-12-8-28-1T on a little over 1.86V. My FX 9590 on the other hand is absolutely incapable of dealing with much more than 2400mhz with such low timings without giving the north bridge a lot of voltage. In the end I managed to get the system to just barely finish SuperPi 32M with 2500 8-12-8-28-2T with 1.83V on the RAM and 1.45V(too much to be safe on air or water) on the North Bridge. Since it's my CPU that's holding the RAM back I'm gonna say that the board handles high performance RAM just fine you just need a capable CPU.
Now some of you maybe wondering about why I do a 1600mhz low timing test. The test exists because most Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs can't go much beyond 1600mhz RAM clock so to get good memory performance it is important to be able to get really low timings at speeds between 1450 and 1650mhz. I'm happy to say that the 990FX-Gaming didn't have any problems doing 5-7-5-18 timings however the board can't go bellow 5 so if you have a kit of RAM that can pull of 1600 at CL4 you're out of luck.
The 990FX-Gaming manages the same maximum core clock at 1.65V as my Sabertooth did. However the software for the Gaming is a lot more painful to work with. Gigabyte's Easy Tune require's Gigabyte's App Center software which requires .NET 4.5 and really didn't like my stripped down win 7 install. So I had to go and make a new install of windows to get Easy Tune to work. Considering that I remember having similar issues with AIsuite so it's not like Gigabyte's obnoxious OC software is anymore obnoxious than ASUS's I'd still prefer a stripped down utility however I do understand that since no one really cares about AM3+ any longer that there isn't a slim OC utility for it.
For cinebench clocks the 990FX-Gaming matches the Sabertooth exactly so again no complaints from me.
Maximum FSB varies from motherboard to motherboard and maxing it out completely is very time intensive. A high maximum FSB is very important when benchmarking CPUs with locked multipliers like the Athlon II X3 460 or a Sempron 145. The Gaming getting an easy 320mhz is inline with what the Sabertooth does which is inline with most 990FX boards. They generally start having issues going above 330mhz on the FSB and as such the Gaming is not inferior to any of them in this department either.
Unfortunately even with the great overclocking results I can't give the 990FX-Gaming a 10/10 here because I've never tested any of the boards that are priced above the Sabertooth and they may deliver better results than this board.


Conclusion: 25/30 Points, 0.179pts/$(based on Amazon price at the time of writing)
Gigabyte's 990FX-Gaming makes for a great AM3+ overclocking board. Personally I prefer it to my deceased 990FX Sabertooth R2.0 and I'm not saying that just because the Saberooth decided to die on me. The fact is that Gigabyte's BIOS offers more features than the Sabertooth's. All the voltages you need are accessible and can be pushed higher than on the Saber. This is especially true of the Gigbayte's Vcore setting which goes all the way to 2.3V compared to 2.075V on the Saber. That's enough voltage to quickly kill FX chips even with LN2. The Gigabyte board also offers core unlocking on Phenom II and Athlon II chips which the Sabertooth R2.0 nor Formula-Z offer. You also get dual BIOS as well as on-board buttons both features that the Sabertooth lacks. In testing the Gaming managed the same results as the Sabertooth and recovered much more smoothly from bad settings than the Saber ever did. This board is however not perfect. The VRM is slightly weaker than the Saber's and while still plenty power full for water or LN2 cooling it requires direct airflow at high voltages and loads which the Sabertooth doesn't need as long as you just have decent airflow in your case. Overall I like the Gigabyte better than the Sabertooth between the buttons, the dual BIOS, the core unlocking and the lower price the Gigabyte is both less hassle to work with, better featured and cheaper than the Sabertooth and from my aircooled testing you don't seem to lose any performance for any of these benefits. Other than that the 990FX-Gaming also offers a bunch of "gamer" features that the Saber also lacks. Really if this board had been available when I was buying my Sabertooth and I weren't a massive ASUS mobo fan I would have probably taken this instead because it's just better and cheaper. So if you're looking for a relatively cheap motherboard for benchmarking ALL(you can't convert X2s to X3s on the Saber or Formula-Z!) AM3+ CPUs the 990FX-Gaming is one of the best out there. Oh and you can use it to play games I guess... if that's your thing.
















As soon as I get my LN2 Dewar topped up again I will do another live-streamed 8+Ghz attempt with the 990FX-Gaming and after that it will be featured for any AMD CPU benching I do until AM4 boards launch.

If you enjoy AHOC's content and would like to see more of it please donate using the button in the top left of the page.

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Livestreaming Announcement and some news

Ok here's the deal. I can't keep putting up notices about live streams everywhere so that people find out about them. So from now on follow this rule: There will be a live stream every Wednesday and Saturday. It will start between 7PM and 7:30PM UK time(google it). If at 7:30PM there is still no live stream up on my twitch then there will not be a live stream that day.

In other news I have replaced my dead Sabertooth 990FX R2 with a Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming. I will put up a review of the GA-990FX-Gaming out soon. I've already unboxed it on the youtube channel and done a live stream with it where it's just me learning the mobo and playing with it before I fully to plasti dipping it an setting it up for LN2. The stream will be up on youtube some time soon. I've also got the materials I needed to make the super cheap CPU DICE pot so you can expect more about that soon.

I bought the new motherboard with money that was supposed to go into getting a capture card so if you want the stream quality to improve then there is button in this page that you can click to pitch in a little to cover the cost of a new capture card. Or just share my content with other people that also works.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

The cheapest LN2 GPU pot ever.

GPU pots are expensive. Like really really expensive. Slims go for 100-200$ and can't handle any of the big GPUs high power GPUs. Fat pots are even more expensive ranging from 200-400$. So basically that means I can't run LN2 on GPUs............
......
.......or does it?

Ladies and gentlemen I present you the Tapester GPU LN2 pot.
It's not pretty but it doesn't leak LN2 and it should be enough for some hilarity on a live stream. So then what is the Tapester? It's a reference HD 4870 heatsink wrapped in a liberal amount of electrical tape. It will mount on 4800 and 5800 cards. It should also fit several other AMD cards but I don't have them so I neither care nor know.


Here's some pics of the first iteration with a few hundred ml of LN2 in it.































The surprisingly leak proof bottom


Pouring LN2 into this first version was a very wasteful affair since I didn't give the top much of a funnel into which to pour.

Also during the whole cooling process the pot was making some horrible cracking noises as the tape shrunk from the cold. One of the cracks even shook the whole pot


I let the pot defrost and dry before I did an inspection of the damage that the LN2 did to it.



This is the only place where I found a visible crack in the tape. I think this is the one that shook the pot when it cracked. I'm also pretty sure that the tape cracked because I stretched it too much when putting it on. Either way I'll just add more tape.





The bottom of the HD 4870 has a layer of plastic. The tape didn't stay stuck to this when I added LN2 so this are got an extra piece of tape to hold it together better.



This wasn't caused by the LN2 but by lazy tape placement. one thing I noticed is that the tape held best when it didn't have any loose edges so this had to go.
Here too the tape started coming off. The solution is obviously more tape.

































I added some extra tape to the top for a proper funnel. After all if I can't get LN2 in the pot it isn't a good pot.


Here's the fixed bottom. The tape is just barely low enough to clear the center shim.




Here's a full frontal shot of the abomination.


And here it is fully insulated with 5mm armaflex and ready to roll. To test it I plan to just run some Unigine Heaven Basic preset with the 4790K on air cooling. If this works I'll have a few more HWpoints to add to my total. But much more importantly I will a working LN2 pot for 2 of my GPUs.Unfortunately I won't do much benching with this for a while because to get a good amount of points I'd also need LN2 on the CPU and I currently don't have the equipment needed to LN2 both a GPU and a CPU.
























If you enjoy the content you see on Actually Hardcore Overclocking and would like to see more please share it or donate using the donate button in the top left of the site. All donations will be used to make more content even if just helps buy more themal paste. Right now though all donations will go towards a capture card.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Saturday Fury X Benchmarking Stream!

I'm going to be live streaming again. This time it will be 3 Fury Xs vs a whole lot of 3Dmark Firestrike and Firestrike Extreme.

I've already set a score of 33970 points with HWbot rules that got me the 18th spot foir 3GPUs in Firestrike on HWbot. However it has come to my attention that I'm not particularly efficient so here's the plan for the stream:

Beat this score

and this one

And this one too

Improve my current Firestrike score on HWbot.

Since bench marking Firestrike on Fury Xs isn't a super involved process I will be doing my best to answer questions during the stream.

I will be starting at 7GMT and basically going until I beat all the score or drop dead trying.

As always the stream will be up on my twitch channel

Monday, April 11, 2016

Possibly the last batch of custom Fiji BIOS


And here is the most likely final batch of custom BIOS. Now including a BIOS for the Fury Nitro and a newer version of the Fury X BIOS which should be better than the old version.

The BIOSs offer raised power limit and a 3D load voltage of 1.3V. This leads to better overclocking capabilities and better performance than the stock BIOSs running similar amounts of voltage in Trixx/Afterburner/GPUTweak. The power limits on all the BIOSs are 400W and 350A you should not need to raise the power limits but can if you wish to do so. The newer Fury X BIOS is based of the latest AMD provided BIOS and seems to clock better than the last one I made but I haven't fully tested it yet(it is safe to use).

Here is  a download link for them: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v18py3rhbef8rmx/ProFijiBIOSs.zip?dl=0

In other news I've done a quick test run of Firestrike with 2 cards and the results are looking promising. The cards aren't fully finished but at this rate I should be able to break 40K graphics some time soon. With some work on the 5960X I can probably get into the top 20 for 3Dmark Firestrike on HWbot. Currently I'm number 65 on the Firestrike rankings for 2 cards. Here's a link to the score: http://hwbot.org/submission/3185463_ 

Mind you I got that score with 0 artifacts so there was still some room in the cards left to push it but it was 3AM and I got the results I wanted to see. Also the 5960X was only 100mhz above my daily OC since I wanted to test the GPUs not mess around with CPU stability issues. Once I have everything working 100% I will be live streaming the overclocking sessions. I'm coming for you 3 way TITAN-Xs and once I'm done they will rename Firestrike to Furystrike.
MFW I get 38.8K GPU score in Firestrike

Also for those of you who watch the youtube channel do not worry. I have not forgot about you, there will be content soon I promise.


If you enjoy reading AHOC and would like to see more content please make a donation using the button in the top left corner. All donations will go towards producing more content. If there is something specific you would like to see you can leave it in a message with your donation or in the comments bellow.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

More Custom Fiji BIOSs

So I noticed that I forgot to include the 3584 core BIOSs in the last BIOS pack. Those are now included. I also got my hands on a Windforce Fury BIOS so those of you who have can now enjoy the magic of overpowered BIOSs. Also apparently the 3776 core and 3840 core BIOS for all Fury cards were name swapped this should now be fixed. Enjoy!

For those who do not know what the custom BIOSs are

Here's the dropbox link

I'd like to make a "pro" BIOS for the Nano however I do not want to set peoples GPUs on fire so I need a Nano to test with. Even as much as I like to think that I'm a famous overclocker. I'm not and so while I can ask AMD/Sapphire/Powercolor.... bla bla bla for samples I don't get them. I think you get the idea of where this is headed. I need money. There's a donate button in the top left of the page.

BTW if you're wondering about my voltmoding progress with the Fury X. Then I got good and bad news.
The Fury X I started with still works. The bad news is that it's currently stuck at +20% Vcore and I can't really bench the card till I fix that. I do know how to fix that because I already did the same thing to my 290X. The problem is that the fix isn't very tidy and I'd like it to look good. It also doesn't help that the fix makes the Volt mod less sensitive. So I'm currently thinking about how to fix the card the best way.

Here's a silly Fury X for the time being


Also I'm considering throwing the Fury Xs on Dry ice if things go well on the stock cooler. Should be pretty awesome based from what Joshy Ocuk told me at The Big Freeze. Apparently HBM absolutely loves cold and at around -70C I won't even have to do much to keep the card happy since the cold bugs are bellow -100C°.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

R9 Fury and Fury X high voltage high power BIOSs


This post is outdated all the new BIOSs can be found in this post.






So as you can clearly see from the image above I have a really awesome desktop background. It started out as a picture of some fire which I...

Ok now seriously my desktop looks pretty great but what is actually important is that the GPU-z window. As you can see the BIOS version says: BZBIOS.FrX.1300mv.400W. This is because it's my own BIOS which unsurprisingly sets the stock load core voltage to 1.3V, sets the stock power limit to 400W and sets the current limit to 350A. This beautiful BIOS does not see the negative FPS scaling that software setting core voltage does and while it still doesn't give us a real 1.3V it does give you a good boost in overclocking headroom and sustained my best card at 1175mhz. You can also run +25mv on top of this BIOS to get even more overclocking headroom but with no FPS loss. On the new 16.3 drivers there seems to be a bug with HBM overclocking on this BIOS. If this is also the case for you with this BIOS say so in the comments bellow so that I can go and make BIOSs with already applied HBM overclocks. I've made BIOSs for every Fury and Fury X that I could. So for now that means the STRIX and the Tri-X Furys and all Fury Xs since those all use the same PCB. I've also made them to support the different unlock levels from 3776 to 4096 SPs for the Furys.

DISCLAIMER: By downloading the following zip file you agree that I am in no way responsible for any damage that happens to your GPU by flashing these BIOSs. 

Dropbox Download Link

These modded BIOSs are only possible due to the efforts of all the people over in this OCN thread. If you would like to learn how to make your own BIOSs just read that thread.

Now if you're wondering about my progress with crushing the HWbot Firestrike leader boards then I have good news. With this BIOS I have finally managed to beat the highscore I set on my Fury Tri-X. Also I will be buying all the voltmodding equipment I need soon and based on the fact that this BIOS mod works so well I do not expect to run into anymore issues with scaling. Also I have acquired an oscilloscope so I will have even more detailed testing results to work with which will hopefully further speed up progress.

If you want more content check out the Facebook Page or the Youtube Channel.
If that's still not enough content for you then consider donating and help me make more.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Fury X testing results

Optional intro

I hate power management algorithms. Sure they save you some power but they make overclocking a nightmare. The smarter they try to be the worse they are. Back when this blog first started I wrote a really long and terrible rant about Nvidia's boost algorithm and AMD's beginnings of what is now know as power tune. The TL;DR of that article can be: Nvidia's is dumb because you can't set core clock and AMD's is dumb because it's broken. Well Nvidia's hasn't changed and AMD's is possibly more broken now then ever before.

I promised a Fury/ Fury X overclocking guide some time ago. I also promised to whoop the ass of Nvidia GTX 980 Ti SLI setups in 3Dmark. If you follow me anywhere where I can be followed you are aware that I haven't delivered either and the facebook followers should know that I've complained that I can't even beat my old Fury score because AMD's drivers are garbage.

Well today I will show you what the problem is.

End of optional intro

TESTING METHOD
I used free cam mode in Unigine to park next to a wall so I could quickly track FPS changes. I was running Unigine Heaven at very low settings so that I was getting about 274FPS at stock clocks. I was running Unigine windowed and had Trixx open so I could change settings and immediately see the FPS changes. After every batch of readigns I checked that the FPS at stock clocks was still the same.

Here are the results in all their glory:



































































































































The core clock and HBM clock scaling in Unigine at 1440x900p is unsurprisingly garbage however what is surprising is the voltage scaling. You can see that even though I did not touch core clock or HBM clock, FPS goes down as I raised core voltage. Also note how power limit did nothing to prevent this drop in FPS. Basically AMD's power tune is as usual completely freaking broken.

Now I would like to see if this is the case for all Fury Xs so if you have one could you do me a favor and just check what happens to your FPS if you're at stock clocks and set core voltage to +96mv and to +198mv. you can mod Trixx to do that using this guide and post your findings in the anonymous comments bellow this post. You will need to run at least 55% fan speed to prevent the VRM from overheating.

For me this perfectly explains why running a 1225mhz core clock with +175mv scores lower than stock clocks in 3Dmark.

Luckily I can just hard mod the card for more power however I'd rather not do that and so I started doing a little investigating. First thing I found is that my PowerColor Fury Xs have 2 100% identical BIOSs. This goes against what some reviewers said about the Fury X coming with a 350W and 250W BIOS. So I've started searching for a 350W BIOS in hopes of getting rid of at least some of the negative scaling. I've also tried to contact AMD about providing a custom 600W BIOS but I doubt I will get a response much less an actual 600W BIOS. So I'll probably end up soldering 600ohm resistors in place of the 300 ohm resistors used for current sensing.

BTW for all those wondering about Fury X VRM temps. They are directly related to core temperature(duuurrr they share a heatsink) so if you're running stock setting and the core is at 70C the VRM is between 90-100C. If the core is at 40C the VRM will be at 60-70C.

Update:
So I've tried several custom BIOS with power limits as high as 768W and got no benefit. I also tried the clock blocker program also no benefit. I'm going try a 65000W BIOS but at this point I don't think it will make a difference. 

DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T LIKE PEOPLE COMPLAINING
As you've probably noticed the table is missing 2 of my favorite data sets. Real world core voltage and power draw are both missing because someone stole my parcel which contained the equipment for measuring those. I still can't believe that the UK doesn't offer pay on delivery. I'm also in limbo about ordering anything else because the idiots running deliveries here would probably leave that in front of my door too.