hd 7970 vapor-x voltage locked

[buildzoid]

I have a HD 7970 Vapor-x and I can't get the voltage to change no matter what I do the card runs ~1115mv the only thing I haven't done is flash my bios. with MSI AB I got some reaction but it was messed up appling lower then set voltage and frequency jumping with temps in the low 70s
these are some of my GPUz read outs (edited to fit and make sense).
2012-10-29 10:01:15 ,300.0mhz,150.0mhz,37.0C,1.246Vcore,1.500V mem
My GPUs default vcore is 1.256v so that above is what the voltage should be in games and Furmark but that read is f1.221,1.500rom idle
These reads are from running Furmark:
2012-10-29 09:52:18 ,1175.0,1650.0,71.0,1.172,1.500
2012-10-29 09:52:19 ,501.0,1500.0,69.0,

Help

 

[Pehla]

I have a HD 7970 Vapor-x and I can't get the voltage to change no matter what I do the card runs ~1115mv the only thing I haven't done is flash my bios. with MSI AB I got some reaction but it was messed up appling lower then set voltage and frequency jumping with temps in the low 70s
these are some of my GPUz read outs (edited to fit and make sense).
2012-10-29 10:01:15 ,300.0mhz,150.0mhz,37.0C,1.246Vcore,1.500V mem
My GPUs default vcore is 1.256v so that above is what the voltage should be in games and Furmark but that read is f1.221,1.500rom idle
These reads are from running Furmark:
2012-10-29 09:52:18 ,1175.0,1650.0,71.0,1.172,1.500
2012-10-29 09:52:19 ,501.0,1500.0,69.0,

Help

wel to be honest i think this is not any simpler then gpu-z picture would be!!
im sry i dont own one ,but from what i have read those card are made for overclocking!!
so voltage tweak should work, maybe some other software for overclocking??

 

[buildzoid]

no gpu-z screenshot

my frequency and voltage change really quickly so It's hard to get a screen shot as for software I used MSI AB, ASUS GPU tweak, Trixx
both trixx and AB have the voltage slider unlocked and I can slide it up and down but my voltage reads stay at the default 1112mv/1172mv if I set my card to 1115mv/1175mv in AB but that's the settings option not through the voltage slider and that's about as much as I can get the voltage to change without changing the BIOS. which I tried using ATIwinflash but it keeps giving me errors saying subsystemIDs mismatch.

 

[Frogger]

giving me errors saying subsystemIDs mismatch

can you post the screen shot of gpu-z anyway so we can see the bios that's on the card now ....is it a new card or e-bay special ...
the bios # should look= VER015.014.000.004.000000

 

[AsRock]

Use GPU-Z and it will show you the voltages it changes too\from. If you need some were to host the picture go to www.techpowerup.org and btw GPU has a screen capture as well ( top right little black camera and can lot you upload it directly just make sure you copy the link ) which will save you from having to crop the picture or any thing.

GPU-Z link
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2181/TechPowerUp_GPU-Z_v0.6.6.html

 

[buildzoid]

the cards brand new because I bought it a week after it was released in the Czech Republic

 

[AsRock]

the cards brand new because I bought it a week after it was released in the Czech Republic
http://img.techpowerup.org/121031/GPU-Z.gif

Use the second tab at the top called sensors and make sure the box is ticked at the bottom to keep refreshing..

Then go play a game for a while and quite it and hover your mouse over the red graphs and it will give the required information. You can all so click the numbers to for min\max\avg\current as well.

 

[Frogger]

looking@ the bios string would make that card the vapor-x Ghz edition with the Tahti XT2 core.. the stock clocks 1050/1500...your showing 1165/1675 great clocks for stock volts! if you go to " C:\Users\GaMer\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE " use the 'edit' to view the "profiles XML" close to the botton of the file you should see the Core Voltage Target the value of Want_1 will be the volt's set by the drivers
<Property name="Want_0" value="850" />
<Property name="Want_1" value="1170" />
above is for a Lightning Tahti XT
Unless Sapphire changed the controller on that revision of the card you should be able to use TRIXX for voltage ajustments. The fastest way to see if it's the card that can't be ajusted is to try it in another system. IS that possible???
??? IF you flip the switch to the 2nd bios do you have any voltage ajustment then ??

 

[buildzoid]

I can't test on a different system.
my profiles file reads:
<Feature name="CoreVoltageTarget_PCI_VEN_1002&DEV_6798&SUBSYS_30001002&REV_00_4&B16BFE2&0&0010A">
<Property name="Want_0" value="850"/>
<Property name="Want_1" value="1256"/>
1256mv is default for the second bios of the vapor-x card
I tried both BIOSes neither makes a difference.
here are screenshots of GPUz with the force constant voltage option ticked in AB:
no load

load

as you can see my voltage no load is ~1.256 the voltage which is default for the second BIOS however my load voltage is 100mv less so I have no idea what's going on if I didn't have the force constant voltage option ticked in AB my no load voltage would be ~0.850 but the load voltage would drop to ~1.112

 

[Frogger]

if I didn't have the force constant voltage option ticked in AB my no load voltage would be ~0.850 but the load voltage would drop to ~1.112

GPU-Z is reading the V's from the driver file not the 'realtime' volts. you can get realtime reads in AB you just need to edit a file in it. file location is C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI Afterburner\Profiles\VEN_1002&DEV.......cfg..
you can use notepad to edit the cfg file add :

[Settings]
VDDC_CHL8228_VIDReadback = 0
MVDDC_CHL8228_VIDReadback = 0

these cards Have a nasty vdroop that you will see in real time. make sure you have force constant voltage option UNticked.

once you have some reads you might want to re&re the drivers and clean the registry to see if you can ajust V's

 

[buildzoid]

so I did the thing with AB and now it reads the exact same volts as GPU-Z.

I also noticed that when i move it to a different PCIe slot my card won't display anything.

 

[buildzoid]

so I did some more testing with different stress test and found out that furmark is causing the voltage to be bellow default settings so I will no longer use it however my GPU still won't let me up the core voltage

 

[Frogger]

the only thing I haven't done is flash my bios

IT might be the thing to do "seems Sapphire locked out the voltage adjustment on the last BIOS for some reason"

 

[buildzoid]

Solution

So I was messing around with the card some more and basically found the following everything goes wrong because of overdrive just use AB because catalyst really really doesn't like this card and causes the low voltage. So to fix my problems I went into CCC unchecked the enable AMD overdrive option and now I get true voltage of 1.218-1.256v when playing Planetside 2 at 40-70 FPS thanks to a 1165mhz overclock. Temps are 58C thanks to my custom and loud fan profile

 

[Frogger]

gald to see you got it worked out

 

[Pehla]

glad to see u figured it out!!i was wondering why it wont OC(raise voltage)
i was all into amd just becouse their OC potential..,then u came and crush my world...
but now that i see its working like a charm all into it again!!

 

[claylomax]

I've heard some of this cards are voltage locked, is that true?

 

[claylomax]

I got mine and it seems it's not voltage locked. So far so good.