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.

Ladies and gentlemen I bring you the GTX 590 AHOC edition

It's huge 
It's impractical
It might not even work
But now it's finally compelete and ready to occupy the top 1% of GTX 590s

The E-power is fully attached I will be mounting the coolers and doing the final chekups tomorrow

Here are some pictures of the monster I've created.

Well it won't fit into any case I know of the the power plane leading to one of the cores seems to be shorted because I'm reading 0.6 ohms to GND. So worst case I'll have to rewire that plane. I did manage to attach pin 17 properly so if pin 16 really was GND this card will still work.
Good news there is most likely not a short on my GTX 590 because I just checked VCC to GND of my  HD 5850 and got 1.8 ohm. So assuming that the GF 110 core has around 1 to 1.1 ohms of resistance my GTX 590 where the VCC is hooked up to both cores should read 1.1/2 so 0.55ohm which would be in line with the reading I'm getting right now. So now I just have to fix one resistor which went missing and fix 2 VCC wires that I pulled when looking for shorts and the card will be fully operational tomorrow.

Sorry about the photo quality but I can't change that without getting a new phone or a camera.
Also I recently revised the support me page so please go check it out.


As always remember to checkout SiliconLottery if you are considering buying an i7 and overclocking it. They sell binned CPUs so you won't have to worry about getting a crap chip.

Hide your motherboards and GPUs buildzoid got an E-power

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN I BRING YOU
POWER!

You have no idea how excited getting an EVGA post box made me today. I've been wanting to buy the E-power for 2 years and waiting to do put this on the GTX 590 for just as long. Now you may be thinking. Why did he only buy 1 E-power to power a GTX 590. The E-power is only rated at 400A on the EVGA spec sheet. The thing is that EVGA spec sheet is actually very conservative. The low side MOSFETs on this beast are IR 6725s these are absolute power houses rated at a continuous drain current of 170A at 25C. This derates to 60A at 125C however there are 14 of them. 14 60A MOSFETs that's a total of 840 amps at 125C. Now if you actually use the E-power properly you should be running it cooler. So in fact a single E-power can power an overclocked GTX 590 just fine. That is as long as you don't use LN2 because the E-power does come with a 900A OCP which would trip when using LN2 and 1.5V.
The GTX 590 isn't the only thing I plan to use this one of these. I also want to use it on this motherboard to build an MATX 5+Ghz FX 9590 computer. No I don't need to go see a doctor about having OC sickness. Why wouldn't you want to attach a 59 euro VRM to a 60 euro motherboard.

Also checkout that image layout Blogger's awkward interface is going to teach me how to HTML at this rate.

I would like to thank Silicon Lottery for being my sponsor. They sell pre binned i7s so if you want to avoid having to deal with the variance in CPU overclocking capabilities you can just buy a CPU from them.

A weekend of overclocking.

I didn't manage to get any full article finished for today so I'll just go over some things I've done overclocking wise.

Firstly HWbot.org has launched GPUPI. It basically SuperPi for the GPU. You can either do 1B or 32B to earn points. Currently the best card for the benchmark is the R9 290X. I did my own little session on 1B and 32B.
Here are my results:

The orange background makes no difference. However it runs best with the non transparent windows 7 theme and having as few windows open as possible does help. This is a 99.9% GPU centric benchmark so even those of you with slow CPUs can get competitive scores given that you're running a high end GPU(AMD is better). Just like SuperPi, GPUPI will complain if your OC is not stable and you get results that aren't correct invalidating your run. 1B finishes in about 20-24 seconds on an R9 290X so if your running air cooling it is entirely possible to start the benchmark at 35C and finish before the GPU starts experiencing heat related instability(for me that is about 70C at 1203/1634 +200mv). 32B on the other hand is a beast that takes 20 to 24 minutes on an R9 290X. Heat is a real problem and my GPU ended up running at 82C throughout the test so you can't use temperature buffering to run higher core clocks. However GPUPI does like VRAM clock more than the core clock so you can get a good scores by maxing the VRAM and running a slower core than for 1B.
Obviously this was my first session so I didn't test everything. I will take suggestions on what software tweaks I should try in the comments.

Other than that I also got started prepping my GTX 590 for the E-power that should arrive this week. So here are photos of the card after I gave it a bath to get rid of the mess that soldering AWG 12 wires with a 150W iron leaves:

Hey if you like reading this blog you should go check out my sponsor Silicon Lottery. They sell pre binned i7s so you don't have to worry about a chip that clocks badly.

R7 260X VRM setup and full voltage modding.

I know I've already done 2 other post on volt modding the R7 260X. However none of them are complete and one of them is plain wrong and just like the saying goes 3rd time's the charm so here's a guide made after I actually went and tested everything. If you don't know anything about hardware volt modding do not try this. If you do something wrong your card will be bricked before your brain registers it(your brain takes 5about ms to process visual stimulus). I will make a post about volt modding basics some time soon but not now. Also I'm taking down the 2 old post because of the before mentioned reasons.
So lets run down the VRM setup of the R7 260X.

Here you have the important controller pinouts. For the FB Vcore a 22K ohm variable resistor from the pin to GND will get you a starting voltage of about 1.3V under load. For the FB aux a 22K ohm variable resistor from the pin to GND will give 1.05V under load. Cut the pins or the traces connected to the pins labeled ILIM to disable over current protection for that VRM.So if you cut ILIM AUX the AUX VRM from the first picture will no longer have a power limit.

The VRAM voltage controller is a super simple controller and does not have over current protection. All you need to do to get it under manual control is to hook it up to a 220K ohm variable resistor to get a starting voltage of about 1.585V-1.6V regardless of load.

I would like to thank techpowerup.com for allowing anyone to use their PCB pics.
Also check out my sponsor Silicon Lottery. They sort CPUs by overclocking capability. Right now you can get an i7 4790K, 5820K or 5960X in a variety of  frequencies from above average to extremely rare. For example a 5Ghz i7 4790K.

The RAM and FAN test bench overview

 Built on an IKEA pine wood wine rack. For low weight.

 With WiFi for easy screenshot uploading and maximum portability.  (Mounted with zipties)

 Based on the Gigabyte F2A88X-D3H I reviewed ages ago.
(Also mounted with zipties)

 Insulated for use with LN2.

and with a crocodile clip for reading CPU core voltage directly

Running an Athlon II X4 750K cooled by a cooler master Seidon 120V closed loop cooler.
(The rad really is just sitting there)

With video provided by my modified R7 260X
(The cooler is mounted with zipties)
(If I get a bigger PSU and another CPU cooler I will replace it with the water cooled GTX 590)







 The RAM currently in this beast is the G.skill ECO 2x2GB 1333 7-7-7-21 1.35V kit I previewed some time ago.







 The HDD is a 350GB WD blue.
(Mounted with even more zipties)

The PSU is an EVGA 430W 80+ unit.
(Held in place by zipties)

This is built from scrap parts from other projects(GPU MB and CPU Cooler) and my friends old PC(wifi and HDD). The reason why I built this is that my 3960X is never ever going to boot with RAM above 2500mhz so I can't use it for RAM reviews. This 750K already managed to boot 2520mhz on these G.skill sticks so it can do a better job with RAM than my main system. Ideally this would be a Z97 system but good Z97 boards cost about 1.5-3X what this board cost and an i5 4690K is about 3X the price of the 750K. Yes I know there is the Pentium G3258 but IMO pairing a 3000czk MB with a 1700czk CPU is stupid. Plus AMD CPUs are funner to OC.
The idea for using the wine rack from IKEA is that. It can hold as much stuff as a full tower, cost only 199czk(10$) and weighs less than any other case you can buy.
I used the cooler master Seidon for cooling because it allows me to easily swap fans for fan reviews.
If I had to change any things I would get a better PSU(750W Seasonic/EVGA) and a better MB(Crossblade Ranger).

I found great site for voltmodding parts

It has has next day shipping in many places. The selection includes some capacitors for motherboards and GPUs and has all the potentiometers you could need. The site is now listed in useful links.
http://www.rs-components.com/index.html

Vmod guide for MSI GTX 980 Gaming

Zzolio just released a great Vmod guide for the MSI GTX 980 Gaming. You can find it here and it's going to be in the useful links page.

Air benching my WTF cooling R7 260X

My good old R7 260X from WTF cooling has gotten even more WTF and now does 1450+mhz on the core.

And this is the V mod I did on the GPU. I finally got my hands on a 10Kohm potentiometer so I got the core voltage under manual control. Unfortunately a 10Kohm potentiometer is not enough to keep the voltage in "safe" territory and so the card has a minimum 3D load voltage of 1.47V. The 3rd wire on the back is hooked directly to the + leg of one of the output caps and ends in crocodile clip to allow for easy measurement of core voltage with a DMM.  

                                               Here's a shot of the side of the GPU. You can see both the potentiometer and the crocodile clip behind it

The screws on VRAM in this and the shot above are there to cool the memory because in my first runs the memory overheated and crashed when above 1670mhz. That's a massive problem on a card that has an anemic 128bit bus feeding cores 896 stream processors running at 1450mhz.

And here's the card running in my main system. The Gelid heatsink did a great job and kept the core bellow 70C° throughout my benching session. The Hynix VRAM on the other hand was terrible and kept me bellow the 1600point mark in Unigine Heaven DX11 Extreme.

Voltmodding GPUs using the NCP and PCP 81022 voltage controllers

So HWbot recently launched this. I think the new division system is awesome and as someone planning to participate in division 5 I decided that I'll help everyone by compiling the available information on the NCP80122 controller found on the AMD reference design R9 285 and R9 260(X) cards.

So here is the NCP81022

The red pin controls the Vcore you can solder a 10K ohm variable resistor(VR) to this and the ground to get control over the core voltage.
The 2 green pins control the over current protection. By increasing the resistance between the 2 you will get a higher current limit. The only problem is that you have to find the resistor that these pins are attached to because I couldn't find a good enough photo and because R9 285 PCB designs differ quite a lot. If you want to completely disable over current protection just remove the resistor that these pins are attached to.
If soldering directly onto the IC's pins scares you(me too they are freaking tiny) then find the first resistor that the pin connects to and solder your VR onto the resistor. If you don't have a VR you can try using pencil.
All these mods are universally applicable to GPU using the NCP80122 or PCP81022 voltage controller.

Sources:
http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?t=75953
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/R9_285_Dual-X_OC/4.html