trying to OC a 580 matrix

mrDMxtreme

New member
So i've had my asus gtx580 matrix for a while now and i'm very happy with the performance (at stock it does EVERYTHING i need it to do, even with my 2 monitors) anyways i've been Folding @ Home more recently, and i want to try to squeeze more PPD out of it.

Now this card come with the software "Asus GPU Tweak" but the problem is that i know F@H mostly relies on the shader clock (which you can't change in the program. So i also have MSI's Afterburner, but with that program i can't control the fans on the card (which is something i would like to do) -- so what should i use?

next question, voltage... now with this card its 1 extra step/thing to think about because there are button on the card itself to raise the voltage of the card, should i use that? or just the programs ? or both?

next thing i have observed is that when i OC the card (which i did a few months ago, just messing around) i saw that after folding for a while the card would suddenly stop working to its full potential?!?!?? NO errors, no crashes just lower temps and a HUGE DROP in ppd, its almost like it throttled itself back...a lot and when that happend i usually had to reboot to get it working normally again (but this NEVER happens when the card is at stock, no matter what i throw at it) so umm, why is this (is it something to do with a 3d and 2d mode?) and how do i FIX it
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Thanks in advance for the help guys , much appreciated
 
Sound strange that MSI Afterburner does not support fan speed on the matrix cards.. if you have the latest version of Afterburner I guess you don't have much choice then. About the Shader clock, you cant only overclock you shader clock on the 400 and 500 card they are locked to the core clock so increasing your core clock increases your shader.

I would raise the voltages from the Asus utility, maybe you can raise your volts higher with the buttons but i would start with the program for voltage adjustment.

As you say, it seems as your card is throttling. This would accrue if a card is overclocked past it's limit and the drivers fail (or temps are to high). So first of all what was your core and memory clocks at? I would start with the basics. Star with a +20MHz on the core and work your way up in 20MHz increments until it fails. If you cant get it stable no matter what do a fresh install of your nvidia drivers. Run Driver sweeper or something similar and install your nvidia drivers again..
 
Sound strange that MSI Afterburner does not support fan speed on the matrix cards.. if you have the latest version of Afterburner I guess you don't have much choice then. About the Shader clock, you cant only overclock you shader clock on the 400 and 500 card they are locked to the core clock so increasing your core clock increases your shader.

I would raise the voltages from the Asus utility, maybe you can raise your volts higher with the buttons but i would start with the program for voltage adjustment.

As you say, it seems as your card is throttling. This would accrue if a card is overclocked past it's limit and the drivers fail (or temps are to high). So first of all what was your core and memory clocks at? I would start with the basics. Star with a +20MHz on the core and work your way up in 20MHz increments until it fails. If you cant get it stable no matter what do a fresh install of your nvidia drivers. Run Driver sweeper or something similar and install your nvidia drivers again..

thanks, yea i have to spend more time with it and slowly see what is happening (its base core clock is at 816, which runs fine, and it gpu tweak has a "gamer" setting that OCs it to 831, which also seemed to work) when i did manual OC i started at like 900
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but the thing is the card can be fully stable with furmark, heaven benchmark, gaming..... but just when folding the throttling happens which i don't understand because it does NOT ever get tooo hot, at stock i've seen it reach 71C but even OCed never over 80C and i've read online ppl ocing this card and getting around 100C on it :S too high for my liking but still...

i'll try tweaking it tonight, after my classes (uni is a pain) and i'll post back

Remove ALL of the asus GPU software matey

would removing it actually do anything? i mean what if i just don't turn it on? Lol i'm asking because it has a few VERY useful features, like the ability to control the fans on the card
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haha and AFTER getting a good OC it actually allow u to CHANGE the BIOS of the card to the OC so that u can then uninstall all the programs and just use the card in its OCed state which will be its default, this also means that u wouldn't lose ur OC if u changed ur system or had to do a reinstall of windows / the gpu tweak/afterburner.
 
k so i've been playing around with the clocks and volts a little, and folding wise i'm pretty sure its stable and it seems that its not throttling anymore? don't know what i did, actually i didn't do anything
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but yes, so far what i did was put the volts to 1100mV on the core and slowly (by 20MHz) raised it to 920, then by 10MHz to 950 on the core, but when for the 940 and 950 just to be on the safe side i pushed the volts to 1125mV. the memory clock I raised to 4500MHz and thats all so far.

temps when up to 82C so i raised the fan speed to 65% which dropped the temps to a stable 77C and its been folding like this for a good 20-30 min with no problems. also i should state that the PPD went up by ~3k from the OC, its now at 21k PPD.

Also i started the OCing in afterburner, but as i saw the temps go up, i closed it and all this was done in the GPU Tweak (because i wanted fan speed control).

i will leave it at this speed for a while (maybe for the rest of the day) but then i'm going to have to try to find a better 24/7 OC because i leave my rig on at night and with 65% fan speed it would be hard to sleep
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i need the fans to be at around 35-38% speed to perfectly fit in with all the other fans (in the case / on the rad) then i'll be happy
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Well i guess patience pays off, nice OC btw.
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Is there a feature in GPU Tweak like in Afterberuner where you can set a fan profile depending on GPU temp?? I would not worry about 80-85c on the GPU, these chips can take heat! Just don't go 90+ that would be a little scary
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What was your stock volts? maybe you can lower them a bit.
 
Well i guess patience pays off, nice OC btw.
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Is there a feature in GPU Tweak like in Afterberuner where you can set a fan profile depending on GPU temp?? I would not worry about 80-85c on the GPU, these chips can take heat! Just don't go 90+ that would be a little scary
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What was your stock volts? maybe you can lower them a bit.

Thanks, i'm pretty sure, no i am sure that this chip can go higher (because i have had it 1ghz a while ago, but that was just to get run 3dmark 11, didn't even try to fold) but with a more experienced person i'm sure it would go much higher...

i know that the chips can handle more heat but i also don't really want it to stay that hot for a long time. If i only used the machine to game on, then fine a few hours w/e but i fold on it probably 18hrs/day,

Also yes GPU Tweak does have a custom fan profile thing to change the fan speed depending on the temps (but as i said on top, since its almost always folding its almost always sitting at the same temp so it doesn' t really matter too much + when it does idle extra cooling never hurt
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)

stock volts were 1038mV. yes with more tweaking i could be using better clock/volts ratio but when i was doing this i didn't want it to crash
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haha just played it safe. maybe over the weekend i'll try to hone it in a bit.

What should i use to check the stabiltity of the card though? i could use folding, but that takes a long time
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because i let it do 3-4% before i say it should be good enough to raise 20MHz or something like that, which is 18-20min of waiting around... wish there was something to check it in like 2min
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know anything?
 
The program I always used was Furmark but it stresses a G-card in a way no game will ever do. I have heard that Nvidia and AMD put in the throttling barrier because of just that reason.. So i find my self testing with MSI Kombuster. But sometimes a overclock that's stable for me in Kombuster will make BF3 crash so I really don't know. OCCT also has a tool for GPU stressing. I cant comment on that because i have never used it..

If I am trying to find a stable OC i would start with Kombuster and when i feel I'm stable I'll play a game (BF3) for some time, maybe after 30min I would call it stable (Come to think of it, its really funny how you need to stress a CPU for 10+ hours in prime to call it stable. While a GPU OC after 1/10 of the time..
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). I guess how you go about it is just a personal preference really.
 
I used Crysis 2 to test my OCs on a 580. Games stress the cards overall the most, furmark probably pushes it a lot too, but I'd personally look at games. My 580 would fly through Furmark and MSi Kombustor but then crash in Crysis 2. Any other demanding game should do the trick too.
 
alright thanks for the ideas (if anything i'll use BF3 and folding because i don't own crysis 2, or any other demanding games (aka skyrim) )
 
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