Posted September 21, 201113 yr So, Gainward send me this card to compete in their VGA OC competition. It's always nice to compete with a free card and I had to make up for the failure that was the Palit competition (card died after 1,5 runs). So, this time, I went up slower and made sure I did everything right to max out the card before eventually sending it to silicon heaven. Important for this card: keep the heatspreader on the card at all times. If you don't use the heatspreader, it will be quite likely that you will blow a hole in the PWM area. I tried my first runs without heatspreader and stopped after 5 minutes as the PWM area was untouchably hot. So, I drove to Leeghoofd to dremel the heatsink a little bit (on the top there was metal in the way of my pot). After that, I could safely return to the benching arena. With Vmem at stock, the card was artifacting around -125°C due to the memory being too cold. Also, the memory was limited to 1150MHz ... not off to a great start. After the Vmem modification, the memory could go up to 1300MHz stable and even 1340MHz with artifacts. The coldbug moved down slightly and as long as I would start the benchmark at -130°C (GT1 loading), I'd be able to bench to -150°C. Still, there were artifacts, but at least the bench got through. After much crashed runs, I finally reached 1375/1325 MHz giving me a final score of 10999. 1 point lower than the goal I set in the beginning of the competition. Overall, I'm quite happy with this result; a lot of hard work to get to this speed, but satisfying nonetheless. Much thanks to Eileen for sending the card. Also thanks to Hazzan and Giorgioprimo for the nice fight in the contest ... I really liked their style of competition with backups (sometimes submitting 10 backups after each other ), but never really secretive about scores. So, in despite of the low amount of participants in this competition, I had fun anyways. I think Leeghoofd has a couple of pictures of the setup when we were benching at his place last weekend. Coldslow BIOS and Vmod guide in this thread: http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26163 Final score: [hwbot=2208383]submission[/hwbot] At least I was #1 at one point during the competition:
September 21, 201113 yr Author If anyone needs the modifications, just ask and I'll post them here too
September 21, 201113 yr If anyone needs the modifications, just ask and I'll post them here too post them without need to ask
September 21, 201113 yr Author Card looks cool, never heard about it or the competition before now. How is that possible when the competition organiser will tell Gainward they have contacted 200k overclockers and there are 5000 participants in the competition post them without need to ask I was gonna, but when I was checking the card, the Vgpu mod fell off . I'll make schematics in a minute.
September 21, 201113 yr who won the competition? pic of card vrm? memory chips same as m*i light**ng?
September 21, 201113 yr who won the competition? pic of card vrm? memory chips same as m*i light**ng? Competition end in 5 days, atm massman is leading http://www.3dmark.com/competitions/gainward-overclocking/
September 21, 201113 yr How is that possible when the competition organiser will tell Gainward they have contacted 200k overclockers and there are 5000 participants in the competition Wow.. not this shit again. who won the competition? pic of card vrm? memory chips same as m*i light**ng? Still on for another 5 days. http://www.3dmark.com/competitions/gainward-overclocking/ Disclaimer: by clicking this link you agree to Futuremarks terms and conditions and are to be considered as participating in the competition 10 times.
September 21, 201113 yr Author who won the competition? pic of card vrm? memory chips same as m*i light**ng? Hazzan and Giorgio will be fighting it out around the 1400MHz mark . Memchips are Samsung. VRM is similar to the one of a reference card. Definitely not much better ... I wouldn't say this is an overclocker's card. It's sometimes nice to work with limitations, though Computerbase's pictures of the card:
September 21, 201113 yr The competition isn't finished yet Entry period runs from August 29nd (11 am GMT) to September 26th (11 am GMT). Wil be OCing mine under ln2 this week end too And planning to fail much more miserably thant massbo did previously ^^ !
September 22, 201113 yr This time nothing went well First I got ridiculous PCI-E 8X bug and then the card literally exploded during 1350MHz run. It took 2 weeks, to get rid of the smell from that smoke. The fire was around 10cm from pbc. Cool! Congratulations Pieter! That is a good card and still alive, which is nice! P.S The pwm design is just slightly better than Nvidia reference. 6 phase design with these mosfets is just getting too hot very easily. In my case the cooling did not help, as you can see Edited September 22, 201113 yr by Massman pic resize
September 22, 201113 yr This time nothing went well First I got ridiculous PCI-E 8X bug and then the card literally exploded during 1350MHz run. It took 2 weeks, to get rid of the smell from that smoke. The fire was around 10cm from pbc. Cool! Congratulations Pieter! That is a good card and still alive, which is nice! P.S The pwm design is just slightly better than Nvidia reference. 6 phase design with these mosfets is just getting too hot very easily. In my case the cooling did not help, as you can see I just exploded with fire 2 times... First time at first second when lauched a GTX 590... The last time, PCI ex burn in fire and need to be removed...lol It gave me a huge scare Uploaded with ImageShack.us Edited September 22, 201113 yr by rbuass
September 23, 201113 yr How is that possible when the competition organiser will tell Gainward they have contacted 200k overclockers and there are 5000 participants in the competition Oof. Maybe El Gappo should subscribe to the Futuremark newsletter or follow us on Facebook to keep up with our OC contest offerings. Our mailing list does contain over 200000 active subscribers accumulated over several years, but to my knowledge we've never claimed that they would all be overclockers. We also receive about 35000 3DMark 11 benchmark results each week, so surely it isn't an outrageous claim that we received 5000 submits (which would actually be fairly close to the actual submit number) that match the contest criteria during the four week period. We don't make stuff up. In the contest Cische is now in the lead with P11039, but Massman is still in second place. There's little benefit to sending scores in early, so there will probably be serious entries coming in over the weekend.
September 23, 201113 yr Crew Oof. So surely it isn't an outrageous claim that we received 5000 submits (which would actually be fairly close to the actual submit number) that match the contest criteria during the four week period. We don't make stuff up. Match contest criteria I would love to see an explenation on that part. If you even have 1000 entries for a worldwide compo that would be an amasing huge number... Plz don't do the same fault as you did with prevous competitions. 20 scores listed and you claimed over 30000 entries. Who are you fooling ? Only yourself and the vendors. But your luck is that the latter still believe in this hoax. Enlighten me plz : How many of these submissions were submitted with the intention to participate in the particular competition ? 20 ? 30 ? I still can't believe you keep on defending time after time something that is so obvious flawed. Some manufacturers PR peoples intelligence must be really down their ...... (fill in a 5 letter dirty word for bottom on the dotted line) Edited September 23, 201113 yr by Leeghoofd
September 23, 201113 yr We also receive about 35000 3DMark 11 benchmark results each week ?????????? 3DMark11 launched on November 30th last year. one year - 9 weeks = 43 weeks Assuming consistent submission traffic, Futuremark have received just over 15 million 3DMark11 results in 10 months. 15 million DX11 results....15 million DX11 GPUs.......I'll be blunt.... smells like BS. I'd smell the same thing if it was 7.5 million The guys who run 3DMark11 the most (ie....us) proabably don't have an active net connection, so FM get no info from each run, just one submission with the best score Edited September 23, 201113 yr by K404
September 24, 201113 yr Crew just to go a bit back on topic a piccie of the running setup... Maybe with the M4E in decent shape it would have been possible to crack 11K...
September 24, 201113 yr This time nothing went well First I got ridiculous PCI-E 8X bug and then the card literally exploded during 1350MHz run. It took 2 weeks, to get rid of the smell from that smoke. The fire was around 10cm from pbc. Cool! P.S The pwm design is just slightly better than Nvidia reference. 6 phase design with these mosfets is just getting too hot very easily. In my case the cooling did not help, as you can see That PWM is awful!See no benefits over stock GTX 580. It is definitely worse!!! Phantom has a great look, nice cooler and works well on the stock clocks. The PCB is cheaper than reference (it is common for all the Palit's innovations). I would not expected anything more but good price -) p.s. IMO the contest is a fail. Just like Palit's OC contest (the same point: wanna win - OC Palit's GTX 580). Both cards are pretty new and rare (it's a problem to find them in the CES market, dunno about all the other parts of the world). They offer a challenge on poor, rare and expensive cards and want to get people involved & get really good results. I suppose Palit and Gainward could have spent their marketing budgets much more effectively but in other way. p.p.s. after seeing the pics and the VRM with my own eyes I'm afraid to OC the card I borrowed these days
September 24, 201113 yr Author p.p.s. after seeing the pics and the VRM with my own eyes I'm afraid to OC the card I borrowed these days Wait, what?! Don't tell me you found out about this comp because of this thread and will now beat me as well?
September 24, 201113 yr Wait, what?! Don't tell me you found out about this comp because of this thread and will now beat me as well? Actually I've found out about it long time ago, and was so stupid that 've found out all the mods by myself. But after reading this thread I'm not ready to start benching though I was one day ago It's always hard to go the correct way with somebody's else hardware that should be given back in mint condition, especially so expensive, tiny and easily-breaking. So don't worry boss. No reasons yet -)
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