R9 380 Nitro Volt mod guide

As you all know I wanted to make an Sapphire R9 380 Nitro(review of the card) volt mod guide. However me being me I royal messed up my R9 380 and had to leave for the UK before I fixed it. However a kind gentleman on Facebook has provided PCB pictures. They aren't exactly what I need however they are good enough to do the guide with. Lets get to it.

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.

So first lets breakdown that PCB into what's important.

There isn't much to modding the card. Hook some sensing wires to the memory and core voltage VRMs and pull a GND from where ever you want to. I highlighted some good candidates in brown.

 

First up core voltage and core current limits. The current limit is simple to disable just cut the 2 traces highlighted in green. Now your card will think it's pulling 0W regardless of what the powerdraw actually is. So power related throttling is history. However it does make it easy to blow up the VRM by running Furmark since there is nothing to stop the card from pulling too much power. This should only be a risk when going over 1.45V core voltage. To cut the traces I suggest digging into them with a needle. This picture also shows how you could try modding core voltage however I recommend that you avoid soldering onto a pin or trace because it is really hard to not screw up. 

Instead solder a 22K(+/-5K) ohm variable resistor from the red point to ground. This will give you free control over core voltage. I recommend not going over 1.35V on air cooling for daily usage. For benching 1.45V is my ceiling. More than that seems to rapidly degrade 28nm GPUs.

The VRAM is an easy mod. All you do is hook a 220K(+/-50K) ohm variable resistor from the pin highlighted in orange to ground and you'll have VRAM voltage on manual control. There is no power limit for the VRAM so you don't have to worry about that. I don't rember the stock voltage of the VRAM on the 380 but don't go over 1.7V for daily usage. On sub zero 1.85-1.95V should be optimal.

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.

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 without breaking a weak soldering joint and is very bulky which might prevent you from fitting the heatsink back on the card.


Please donate if you want to see more guides! I can't do mods on GPUs I don't have and unfortunately I'm not important enough to get free samples yet...
If just 200 of you were to donate 5$ I would be able to do almost any GPU you're interested in.

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.

R9 290/R9 290X Refrence PCB Overclocking Guide

The R9 290 and R9 290X are AMD's current flagship single core GPUs. I have 1 of each running in crossfire and have benched both of them extensively.
I expect that you know what is where in afterburner and you know how to configure custom fan profiles.

Software you will need
For daily use and aircooled benchmarking:
MSI afterburner
Sapphire Trixx
For benching on water or LN2
PT1/PT3 BIOS (link in useful links page)
GPU Tweak 2V (link in useful links page)
AtiWinFlash (link in useful links page)

Air 24/7
The Hawaii GPUs are pretty tanky so they can be overvolted for years without any negative effects. For 24/7 overclocking you will only need MSI Afterburner because going above +100mv on the core voltage generally doesn't help your frequency margin much and is about as high as you want to go for 24/7 overclock. There is no reason not to set the power limit to 150% so just set it to 150% and forget about it.

The Core
Most Hawaii GPUs do about 1100mhz without raising the core voltage. Once your card can't go any higher on stock volts start raising the voltage by 12mV. While voltage does increase frequency ranges AMD cards are really sensitive to temperatures and so the increased operating temperatures can counter act the increase in voltage. This is not an issue for people on water cooling but for people on air coolers I recommend tweaking the fan curve too avoid going above 85C° however if you can tolerate the noise of your cooler at 90% just set it to hit 90% at 70C° and you should be all good temp wise.
Afterburner has an AUX voltage setting for the Hawaii cards. Unfortunately no one really knows what the best setting for it is and I haven't fully test it yet so you will just have to test it at settings between -50mV and +100mV going by 50mV increments. I have mine at +100mv to get 1140/1550mhz on my Windforce R9 290X. I do suspect however that the AUX voltage somehow impacts the core voltage either in stability or how high it is.

The VRAM
The VRAM on Hawaii cards is very different from previous cards. ALL Hawaii cards have a golden ratio of
VRAM clock/core clock. This ratio varies from card to card but is generally between 1.25 and 1.4. Once you find this ratio it will generally allow you to run a much higher memory clock than try to incrementally raise VRAM frequency. For example my R9 290X has a ratio of 1.36 and 1140/1500 is not stable on it but 1140/1550 is even though they are at the same voltage.
While the Hawaii cards do not have memory voltage controls available in any software the memory clock does scale with core voltage so if you are trying to push a high memory clock you wil need to raise the core voltage regardless of your core frequency.

For some reason Hawaii cards don't always downclock  the memory when idling so when you are going above 1350mhz VRAM with an OCed monitor or on a multi monitor setup you will need to set Afterburner to constant voltage. This will not negatively impact the life span of you card because the idle core voltage will still be under 1V. I also recommend trying this if you crash when pressing apply because that happens for the same reason. Your VRAM OC kicks in but the voltage stays at idle levels and you get a crash.

Water 24/7
Do what you did for air 24/7 but use sapphire Trixx to get above +100mv core voltage.

Air Benching
Do what you did for the Air 24/7 but use Afterburner to set your AUX voltage then use Sapphire Trixx to get +200mv core. If you have an air cooler just max the fan speed since you're benching.

Water/LN2 Benching
!! COMING SOON !! NOT because my card does not like the available LN2 BIOSs sorry