BFG 285 GTX clock speeds

[grinder]

got a RMA replacement card in the mail yesturday. BFG 285 GTX OC

It certainly does NOT feel as smooth gaming as the old 280 it replaced. I ran vantage and this hardware monitor from RivaTuner looks strange.

Temps look good, but all the core/shader/memory clocks look messed up during the benchmark. Is there some stupid "cool'n'quiet" setting for this video card i can disable? Because that's what this performance graph looks like. I thought the clocks were supposed to be solid on idle or load.

The above graph was taken running 3dMARK Vantage's first scene. Vantage crashed before it could load the Space scene.

[martin_metal_88]

According to BFG website, your card is supose to have 666 core clock and 1521 Memory clock. Your card is more looking like a OC2 but a little under. It`s pretty wierd. I think you sould contact them or try downclockinng the card wiith riva tuner or EVGA precision tools.

[grinder]

great observation metal!!!

i'll load the evga tool and drop the settings. I didnt think clocks would be an issue looking at the temps (the temps seem normal to me).

By dropping the clocks to spec i'm able to finish a couple runs of futuremark Vantage which is a huge improvement.

The true test will be later tonight when i do some gaming.

[martin_metal_88]

Well, clock act the same as a propeller engine. If you take the exemple of the Dash-8, they are made to run just under the speed of sound. If the propeller were going 1% faster they would break in a second, you see my point? GPU like 285 are already factory pre-OCed GPU and sometime to the maximum of their capacities. That's why big card like these are rare on OC version, because the chip witch can OC more are, golden one;). If the test isn't concluding for you ask me back I have few other Idea depending on the issue.

[rjbarker]

1. Which Driver you running? Some of the 19x.xx Drivers are infamous for either not downclocking properly or downclocking when in a 3D App.

[grinder]

hrm... well vantage is crashing again now at full res (1900x1200). Clocks went down to 699 (core), 1590 (shader), 1333 (memory). This SHOULD be the factory clock, but like i said, the clocks from my original post is as it was set from BFG when it hit my doorstep.

Drivers:
190.62 and 191.07 were tried.

OS: Vista 64 bit.

On a clean install of win7 the same symptom persists. On that OS i even tried the beta drivers from nvidia (no positive effect)

Continuing on this trend it would appear as though gaming stability will be achieved if i UNDERCLOCK this vid-card. That seems quite unacceptable. I may have to RMA this thing all over again =P

[grinder]

UPDATE:

reduced the card to vanilla GTX 285 speeds and things seem well:
CORE: 646
MEMORY: 1246
SHADER: 1469

Went through 10 passes of 3dmark Vantage without a crash. Scores probably went down a bit, but if i can game i can't complain.

Default Vantage Score (on Performance setting @ 1280x1024): GPU: 11759 (test1: 35.15 FPS, test2: 33.71FPS)
(performance setting @ 1920x1200) GPU: 7408 (test1: 22.87FPS, test2: 20.49)

these numbers seem right?

[martin_metal_88]

well you only have a OC version of the card witch should not be OC. sorry my friend. Go over with your test and give us some news later;)

[Soultribunal]

Maybe its one of those cases of The wrong BIOS loaded onto the card, like the HIS Fiasco months back.

Might need to flash it and get a new BIOS on it?

Just a thought,


ST

[odis172]

Originally Posted by grinder

got a RMA replacement card in the mail yesturday. BFG 285 GTX OC

Ah Ha! Card back from RMA with problems eh? Where I used to work, about half the parts we had gotten back from RMA that were given to me to use in systems, I had problems with. Im not too sure how the rma process works on the manufacturers side, but I think they test the returned products and if possible fix small issues, then send that card out as remanufactured, and not neccessarily to the person who sent it in. Seems to me that some manufacturers dont test the products as thoroughly as one would be led to believe.