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MSI Radeon R7870 Hawk Overclocking Test (1400/1600 air, 1700/1750 LN2)


Massman

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Introduction

 

May 1st.

 

Labor Day – a national holiday. We are legally not allowed to do any labor today. Being a rebel at heart, I do it anyway. Eat that, holiday-inventors!

 

Trees, ice-cream, golf carts, frogs, endlessly long boring speeches, multi-color pens, slightly bent measuring rods, peas and pies, a punch to the throat, cardboard box ripped apart by a genuinely excited birthday boy, a cow urinating at the same moment you’re trying to capture the beauty of nature. These are all things that are not relevant to this topic.

 

About a week ago, I bought a book online. I was planning to start reading it the moment it arrived on the doorstep. But, so far I haven’t read a word. Why? Who knows. Perhaps I already regret buying it, perhaps I’m just boycotting the hobby of reading books altogether. I don’t know the author, but judging by his name I can already sense he’s a friendly fellow. When I have read the book, I’m sure I’ll send him an email asking to get together for a drink; not just to congratulate him on the fantastic book he wrote, but also to make a note of how friendly his name sounds. He’ll laugh and I will return that laugh with a smile. We are friends now. After the drink, laugh and exchange of personal secrets, I’ll tell him I am an overclocker.

 

He probably doesn’t know what overclocking is. But I don’t care – he’s a friend now and he’s allowed to not like what I do.

 

Let’s think.

 

Pictures

 

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System Details

 

- AMD Bulldozer FX-8120

- Intel Core i7 3770K

- Intel Core i7 3930K

- GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7

- MSI X79A-GD65 8D

- GIGABYTE Z77-D3H

- GeIL Evo Corsa GOC38GB2133C9ADC 2x4GB (x2)

- MSI Radeon R7870 Hawk

- Thortech Thunderbolt 1200W

- Windows 7 64-bit

 

Bulldozer Results

 

8100m.png

 

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Sandy Bridge-E Results

 

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Ivy Bridge Results

 

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43062s.jpg 144799s.jpg 359673s.jpg

 

LN2 overclocking

 

MSI has two line-ups for overclocking fanatics: the Hawk series and the Lightning series. The Hawk title is usually given to a more mainstream product, whereas the Lightning is for high-end top-of-the-range cards. As you can see from the voltage measurement points, this card is build for overclocking.

 

On stock air cooling, I could reach 1400/1600 and run it through all benchmarks. Pretty impressive I'd say. On LN2, I was able to run 1700/1650 in the first tests, but only get it stable through GT4 of 3DMark11. GT1 always crashed after 20 seconds due to OCP issues. With a new VGA bios, the OCPissues were resolved and I could finally start testing the card under LN2 seriously. After a bit of work (more on that later) I could get the card all the way upto 1700/1750 through 3DMark11!

 

11240m.png

 

Now, as mentioned before, the card does require a bit of work to get running properly under LN2. Not only does it have the typical HD7000-series temperature/monitor issues (screen goes blank under specific temp), but it also has a CBB. Also, you need to slowly work your way up to the higher clock region if you want things to run fine as well as figure out the ideal voltage settings. Once in a while, you'll have to go into safe mode and uninstall Afterburner as a crash makes it impossible to load into Windows normally (instant black screen). Below a certain temperature, Afterburner might also lose the ability to set voltages. So, as you can see, there is a bit of work involved. But, once you have the card up and running, it's quite a lot of fun!

 

A couple of key pointers:

 

- Use the OCP VGA BIOS: link

- Have a safety clock setting you always load before starting to go north of 1600MHz core (I used 1400/1500)

- Set the voltages before dropping the temperature

- Run GT4 to check for artifacts or cold issues

- Play with the AUX voltage to lower the temp at which the monitor starts to go bezerk

- Coldbootbug on my card: -90°C

- Coldbug on my card: -120°C (below that memory issues)

- Vgpu droop is a little high: 1600mV set = 1621mV idle = 1567mV load

 

Temperature scaling:

 

- -50°C 1550MHz at 1.45V

- -50°C 1600MHz at 1.5V

- -55°C 1625MHz at 1.6V

- -70°C 1650MHz at 1.6V

- -90°C 1700MHz at 1.6V

 

1700/1750 requires the following voltages:

 

- Vgpu: 1600mV (not scaling higher)

- Vmem: 1800mV (1800MHz was also stable, so more left)

- Vaux: +200 (helped pushing monitor issues down to -110°C; higher voltage didn't really help)

 

Here's the piece of paper I used to write down settings and problems. Not sure if it will help, but it might be interesting for pointers or at least to see how my LN2 process/methodology goes :).

 

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In the next week, when I get a fresh dewar of LN2, I'll run the card with Ivy Bridge too. More coming!

 

Conclusive Lines

 

I'm giving 10/10 to Rachel from MSI for providing me this R7870 Hawk to test :).

 

r7870Award.png

 

About the award: MMB+ stands for Meaningless Marketer Bonus Plus (meaningless refering to the award, not the marketer!). The award has no value outside this forum and is not related to the product quality in any way. It's merely to please the person who gives me a kit to test and help him/her to show an award to their boss. This way, me not giving a damn about awards will never harm anyone in terms of yearly bonus. If you want to know how the product really is, read the thread and read other reviews. So, seriously, this award is pretty meaningless.

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I'm giving 10/10 to Rachel from MSI for providing me this R7870 Hawk to test :).

 

r7870Award.png

 

About the award: MMB+ stands for Meaningless Marketer Bonus Plus (meaningless refering to the award, not the marketer!). The award has no value outside this forum and is not related to the product quality in any way. It's merely to please the person who gives me a kit to test and help him/her to show an award to their boss. This way, me not giving a damn about awards will never harm anyone in terms of yearly bonus. If you want to know how the product really is, read the thread and read other reviews. So, seriously, this award is pretty meaningless.

Bahaha brilliant :D

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Is the reactor unit a requirement for LN2 Ocing ?

 

Not entirely sure. It's the same deal as with the 7970 Lightnings: some will say it gives a solid boost, others will claim it doesn't do anything. I had it plugged the entire time and it worked out well clocking-wise.

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Thanks for the write-up. Looks like a solid card. Cool you got rid of the GT1 crash issues.

Hawk looks interesting like usual. Wondering about the big vdroop, maybe it's by design..?

 

GT1 crashes went away with a new BIOS. It's as simple as that ... just needed an OVP fix :).

 

MSI told me the Vdroop is an issue on the AMD reference cards as well. They're checking with AMD for a solution, afaik. The voltage isn't going up and down, though, so it's just a matter of knowing that you'll run at a bit lower voltage during the benchmark.

 

Imho, voltage isn't really a problem on this card. The core frequency is limited by the temperature issues anyway.

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Tried a couple times more ... but no improvement. Seems like my card is just inferior to all the cards Elmor has in his lab :).

 

ASIC quality of my card is 80.3% by the way.

 

Contact without removing the shim around the core was good:

 

contact.jpg

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I tested mine on ln2 today.

 

It was very easy up to 1700MHz, but after that point it was not going too smoothly.

These cores have a lot of issues with temperature and also with voltage.

If they could scale like in the beginning, 2ghz would be no issue.

 

There might be some internal divider issue on the core and we need to get new modified bios to fix it.

I will investigate this with my contacts.

 

Here is the result I got:

11577.png

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Hehe, typical 7-series core. I had that "issue" with 7970 cards. They could oc, but scaling was poor.

 

I did not remember to mention, that asic quality on mine was 85,5% and it was able to run 1900mhz as well, but I got crash in combined test few times on a row and I had to go to sleep anyway. I can not retest the card, cause there is a lot of other things to do.

 

But we can say, that asic quality seems to give us information we need :)

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  • Crew
We are using 3Dmark11 noob! haha, you are just too old for this stuff...

 

just out of the RADAR sim after 3 hours, pretty braindead :P

 

Once you get into the 40 league we will talk again, young radical ! Stummie knows what I'm talking about :P

Edited by Leeghoofd
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  • 6 months later...

Hy guys

 

Firstly sorry for hijacking your thread. Secondly, really awesome scores guys!

Now down to business

 

I got my Hawk the other day and i'm trying to push it a lil more than i can atm.

I am running 2600k @ 4.4 atm but am gonna take it to 4.8 again later tonight. My biggest issue is that i seem to be stuck at 1300 core and 1550 mem.

Now i don't have LN2 and am not going to be so i am wanting to push it on air as far as i can.

 

On my initial runs i get a max of just under 10600 but am really wanting to try break the 11k mark.

 

I am running 12.11 Beta 8 drivers and AB is ver 2.3.0 but the voltages get maxed out at 1350 and 1700.

I am running on the LN2 switch as i was having issues with stability with the switch on normal.

 

Would i need to flash the bios to be able to up the voltages a lil more or is there something that i am not doing right?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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