Some benching fun

[Eldonko]

Finally got mounting hardware made for my solid pot (that I named donkeypot) so now Im gtg for benching Friday. Have the day off work so Ill be benching 3d. Unfortunately I killed one of my best two ballistix 8500 sticks so I cant really do 2D atm with 4GB kits. However Ill prob run wprime at least as mem doesnt make much difference.



Having issues with 3870 but modded 8600 is clocking well so Ill be shooting for top scores with that card. 975 core on H20, @ 1.7v, need sub zero for >1k.





Once I get that custom milled insulation and holddown from duniek, donkeypot should do well so 3870 benches next time.

[vinister]

3870 voltmods work very well in single-card applications. However, O/C'ing in crossfire is next to impossible though at seemingly any voltage, so don't bother if you have 2!

on upgraded air cooling, my 2 3870s (individually) do 980/1340 3d stable at 1.48v, max temps in high 60s

in crossfire I get crashes at only 820/1240 (just a hair over stock), running 1.38 volts, adding more just drives temps into the 80s.

I'm not sure if its a driver issue or what but the cards both run much much hotter in crossfire, and generally just seem to hit their limit right away. As a result, my score and gaming performance is roughly the same with one card oc'd vs. 2 cards at stock. I kind of wish I had stuck to the OC'ing, and saved all that extra money, power, heat, and headache.

pic for effect

[Eldonko]

I only have 1 card and no CF boards so Im not worried about CF at this time. The issue with mine is HIS card has some sort of OCP/OVP and shuts down the card at about 1.45v so it make the vmod not very useful. I was told it could be a BIOS issue tho so Im going to try and get it sorted by flashing a giga or similar bios.

Thats weird about the CF tho, it shouldnt be that much lower. You using 8.3 drivers?

[e_1337]

Way cool!

[vinister]

To stop the card from shutting down or reverting to low temps, end the 'CCC' process in task manager before your benchmark/game. I found that it was crashing alot of games at high voltage unless you kill the process, then there would be no problems.

Want to try my visiontek bios?

Here's a zip with my stock and modified bios. Stock is 800/1200, Modified is 920/1300. You'll need about 1.45V to run this speed, and about .05 more to get to 980. I couldn't get any further, there was just too much heat. With better cooling 1Ghz is common at around 1.53V.

These are the stock clocks shown in Rivatuner, of course you don't need rivatuner because the card is at this speed right at bootup.

[Eldonko]

Thanks, will look into that. My card doesnt seem to be working but it might be shorting so Im gunna test it further.

[Eldonko]

Spent the day today benching 3110 and 8600GT. What a day tho, had a big bag of dice and managed to lock my keys in my car somehow with the dice trapped in the trunk. 3 hours and alot of coat hangers later I got it open lol. My spare key was in the dash, yup im a smart one.

Max I could run 3D @ was around 5G or a lil more, but that is because my last D9 kit died and I had to bench with 4GB kits that errored out at about 560. Ran all that I could 3D and 2D tho just for hwbot points. :)

Pics:



GPU seemed to have weird cold bug because I couldnt boot into windows without the display going crazy at any speed. I reseated the card and troubleshot it forever but I couldnt get it to work frozen. Returned to h20 on gpu and resumed benching.



This is about the max I could bench at but it was all mem errors, when my 8500 ballistix gets back from RMA Ill redo all this. Chip has good potential I think, another 20-30 FSB in in for sure. My slo ass 4gb time :p

[Wankerfx]

Seems like a lot of people in Canada are benching this week

Awesome results, I really need to get my hands on a modern CPU and motherboard.