benching my 6950

[denali6194]

Hi all,

I have a reference Powercolor 6950 that I bought a while back. I've been intending to flash the BIOS to 6970--both just to do it and to see if there was a noticeable difference but haven't had the time til this weekend.

I haven't flashed the BIOS(yet) and I decided to run a few benchmarks before and after. I started with 3DMARK 11 (free/basic version) but I kept getting low scores (P4200ish). 3DMark suggests "updating my VGA driver to ver 8.850.0.0" (apparently I currently have 8.720.0.0 which I'd think would be more recent). Mb I got a case of the stupids today but I don't even know what drivers they are referring to. The driver number has no relation to the ATI drivers as far as I can tell. I'm running the latest 11.7 drivers from ATI and keep all of my drivers up to date. I'm going to run some other benches and see what happened--mb it will calm me down a bit.

The other thing that is strange (at least to me) is that when I ran 3DMARK 11 for the second time, I noticed that my GPU showed Memory: 0 Mhz, Core clock: 0 Mhz, and memory at 1 Mb. I've never run these benchmarks before cause I don't really care about the score so long as my games run smoothly (except for that amdkmapp error or whatever, that I've just given up on). I mainly run stress tests on my cpu OC, p95, intel burn etc. but now I am obsessed and want to sort this thing out.

Any suggestions that might help work out the kinks?

 

[AdrianD2]

If you have any games that have the Benchmark Test in the settings, just use those. Do 5 test, throw out the highest and least, then average the rest. Then compare those to the flashed 6970.

 

[Ya93sin]

I think for testing any GPU overclock or modification then running game benchmarks stresses the GPU more than the other types. Try Metro2033/Crysis2/Mafia II, those are very demanding benchmarks.

 

[denali6194]

I think for testing any GPU overclock or modification then running game benchmarks stresses the GPU more than the other types. Try Metro2033/Crysis2/Mafia II, those are very demanding benchmarks.

yeah, i would but i'm not rly into those games so never bought em. recently i wiped my drivers and went back to 11.7. I was using 11.8 and i think that is what was causing issues. that or maybe some heat. i've manually turned up my fan and things are running great the past few hours. also ran heaven and that went very well.

cheers and thx for the advice