club3d radeon hd 7950 royalking, not so good

[PatButcher]

For me this card would crash at 65c regardless of what clocks I was running,

[kibasnowpaw]

i have a XFX 7950 and it the worst card ever i mean really the Fans sound like a jet engine and when it's come to OC it just sucks to hard the OC clock i can get it at is Core: 997 Mhz MEM: 1400 Mhz
i end op getting a Arctic Cooling for it an it never get over 54 C. not even on full load

[leejc73]

Hi All,
I too bought the royal king on the back of Tom's review and I was going to make a comment about him getting a cherry picked core but that's nothing unusual.
I had a real headache getting this it to anything like the speeds that Tom demonstrated but I got close in the end by just upping the core clock without touching the mem clock.
I got to 1200 on the core with 1.149 volts but I can't take the memory clock anything over 1400 without experiencing crashes. I have noticed some crashing when playing BF3 at around the 65 degrees mark but I've just modified my fan profile to bump it to 100% at 60 which appears to have stopped it.

So I haven't got exactly the performance Tom suggested was possible from this card but with the good core oc and the mild mem oc it's ticking along nicely thanks.

It took my about 6 hours of playing with afterburner/heaven/vantage to reach this point, so my suggestion would be to drop the mem speed to default and see if you can get the core up to 1200, then drop the volts as low as possible before you get stability issues. Then see if you can get a mem overclock out of it.

It's not a bad card by any means and for the money I'm more than happy with it, but like the rest of you I thought I'd got a lemon of a card (although still doing what it was advertised to do) before I started putting some effort into getting as much out of it as I could. It is loud as hell on 100% fans though.

Cheers
Lee

[sosolidshoe]

Yepper, I didn't think I'd be the lucky one; my particular card won't overclock at all. Even increasing the core by 20MHz causes screen flickering and artifacting, and increasing the volts just makes it worse. That's using Afterburner with the voltage options ticked off and the cfg files edited btw.

Looks more and more like they sent Tom a seriously cherry-picked sample.

[Christoi]

I think it's important to note that the HD7950 is a binned chip on it's own, with 4 compute units disabled given they didn't meet the standards during AMD's testing to be sold as an eligible 7970. Therefore it's often the case that these cards don't overclock necessarily as well as the higher-binned 7970, so don't assume that high overclocks are possible.

Just to put things into perspective, when AMD released the boost edition cards which came clocked in at 925mhz, they also bumped the voltage up to 1.25v to ensure that all chips would be able to hit that overclock.

[sosolidshoe]

Originally Posted by Christoi

I think it's important to note that the HD7950 is a binned chip on it's own, with 4 compute units disabled given they didn't meet the standards during AMD's testing to be sold as an eligible 7970. Therefore it's often the case that these cards don't overclock necessarily as well as the higher-binned 7970, so don't assume that high overclocks are possible.

Just to put things into perspective, when AMD released the boost edition cards which came clocked in at 925mhz, they also bumped the voltage up to 1.25v to ensure that all chips would be able to hit that overclock.

Absolutely, I don't think anyone here is griping or feeling sorry for ourselves, but silicon lottery or not it's useful to give anyone thinking about getting this card as much info as possible, and so far we're up to four or five "no go" and one "not as good" experiences compared to TTL's one "excellent" experience.

Note that I'm not having a go a TTL here, he reviewed the product he was sent and he gave his standard warnings on the subject, but I am annoyed at what appears to be yet another attempt by a manufacturer to manipulate review results by providing carefully selected pre-tested components which they know will perform well with no regard for the overall performance of the product line.

[Ironhand]

Originally Posted by kibasnowpaw

i have a XFX 7950 and it the worst card ever i mean really the Fans sound like a jet engine and when it's come to OC it just sucks to hard the OC clock i can get it at is Core: 997 Mhz MEM: 1400 Mhz
i end op getting a Arctic Cooling for it an it never get over 54 C. not even on full load

Hmm. That is odd.

I have the XFX 7950 Double D and the GPU Clock is at 1Ghz and Memory clock is at 1450Mhz. Its completely stable & quiet while gaming.

[Scoob]

Did we ever get OP's full system specs? A poor / under-spec'd PSU could potentially explain all the issues he had.

Ok, getting a card that overclocks well is a BONUS certainly, however, we have really been quite spoilt for the past few years with both CPU and GPU's usually overclocking very well indeed. Expectations have been set thus by the recent impressive run of hardware.

If the card isn't stable totally stock, then there's a problem. Maybe the card is faulty, it happens even with the best of brands, sometimes stuff gets bounced on its way to us. Having the OP's FULL system specs would be very useful in trying to help, in case there is some deficiency there.

Scoob.

[Scoob]

EDIT: Well, I was replying to another post but it seems to have been deleted!!


PSU?

Overclocking will pull significantly more power, as my own recent testing using a wall-plug power meter have proven. Did you not say thought that you also get instabilities at stock?

If you're not stable at stock, then overclocking will potential just exagerate the issue.

I would pop the system back to stock, with the GPU at stock too & test. Then re-apply the CPU overclock - which I assume was previously stable prior to fitting the 7950 - and test again. I reverted my whole system to stock when I had some weirdness with a GPU overclock - it turned out to be a driver issue between the latest NV beta (at the time) and Skyrim, no other tiltle nor benchmark nor stress tool had any issues what so ever. My point being, I eliminated my CPU overclock from the list, so to speak.

Just some comments on how I test stability...

I start off with 3D Mark Vantage usually, this has proven to be a good, balanced test and can highlight both CPU and GPU instabilities. I then often follow up with Heaven 3.0, as that's fairly heavy on the GPU.

Next I get a bit harsher, I use IBT with AVX extensions for CPU stress test / stability checking, it's the hardest your CPU will ever be pushed. If it's ok for a few minutes on that (usually things fail in the first few seconds if there's a problem) I'll then do much longer tests with something like Prime.

I then tend to run the "Furmark" test that's part of OCCT, that get's my GPU's hotter than anything else does by 5-7c.

If my machine passes these test, I consider it stable, and bump things up again.

Personally, my 2500k is not a good one - a Silicon lottery DNF in effect - as one of it's cores is very poor, and struggles past 4.6ghz. The other cores just keep going to 5 quite happily though, which is frustrating. Still, at "just" 4.5 it does everything I want.

Not sure what else to suggest, but you do need to get back to stock EVERYTHING and test from there. It could be a power issue, it could be that your card is faulty, or maybe it's just one of those cards that won't overclock.

Best of luck.

Scoob.