Radeon 5970 Overclocking: The VRM Temperature Bottleneck

[LordEC911]

I think we have to take things like furmark into consideration because we never know how stressful future programs and games will be. Also if it is not stable in something brief like OCCT or furmark, who is to say we are not causing longterm damage to the card over a longer period of time.

People saying we will never see loads like furmark simply want progress to be held back for the sake of their argument. Something like this program can easily be fixed if another phase of power was added to the card. When the cards are 600 a piece and such a add on would be insignificant to the overall cost, they should do it for the benefit of the customer, especially if these cards are being marketed to overclock.

Honestly, I think most people would love if a game was programed so well, that it was using 100% of the videocards power. This might be a tad unrealistic because its difficult to programs in such a manner when there are so many hardware configurations there are, unlike consoles.

However, I can see a program(not game), especially if open Cl does take off, which could be as stressful as furmark. If these cards ever want to be taken seriously in the supercomputer world, they better be beefed up because there will be programs that use 100%.

It was not until the 4870 series, which had crashing with furmark, that we started calling it a power virus on AMD accord.

However what is the point of a stress program if it does not show long term stability. A stress program has to prove stable in the short term at above average loads to show a piece of hardware can stay stable in the long term at lower loads. If elevator manufacturers only tested to the maximum rating, most of us would feel alot less safe in a crowded elevators. Or if tires were only tested up there speed rating, we would see alot more tires burning out.

Programs like Prime95 or Intelburn in, test beyond realistic loads, but do we call them power viruses? No we don't.

How do you know the VRMs are underbuilt?
I had some very nice posts in the OCCT thread that went unnoticed and were buried by the common sheeple, so I feel your pain.

The thing is, other than a few synthetic programs, no real app has come close to stessing the cards this much, not even the GPGPU programs that run quite well on AMD/ATi cards. This dnet thing is new to me so I will have to look into that, haven't heard about it before.

Power virus was brought up due to the fact that it very accurately described these aforementioned programs. They seemed to have been specifically coded to exploit ATi's shader architecture, especially in the case of OCCT since it was a Nvidia sponsered app.

No longterm study has been done on the longevity of these cards being stressed. Any comment made on that subject is pure baseless speculation with no evidence or facts.

the 295 has no thermal problems though, in the dual or single PCB version.

Mine idles at 45C and never goes above 75C even after 4hrs of Crysis.

Here you are, crying about other crying about a bias synthetic test, and then say your GTX295 doesn't have any thermal problems because you don't have high temps in Crysis. What a freaking coincidence...

If you look at anhilators posts, they are generally quite neutral. I don't thinks its a matter of putting faith particularly in nvidia. Its that the general attitude is Nvidia is bad, ATI/AMD is good.

E.g underbuilt VRM, terrible quanities, AMD officially raising prices(on the 5870, 5970 and 5950) and using slag marketing tactics and on this forum, they are praised for it or don't under go criticism.

And if a criticism is valid, it somehow gets turned into not their fault or the blame is put on someone else. E.g it works fine under stock settings or games are that stressful in real situations(even those it is marketed to be an overclocked card or future games may prove otherwise), Its TSMC fault(they should have stockpiled longer), the markets calls for price increases(although it has never ever happened before), using slag marketing tactics(this one NV gets called y and some sarcastic comment about whoop ass; when AMD does it cool and everyone laughs at NV).

NV on the other hand does anything and they are reamed out to kingdom come. Some people who have generally a pretty good attitude in general towards both companys like SKYMTL, are criticized for being anti AMD, when its pretty obvious from their comments of past and their reviews that they are not.

This board has turned so pro-AMD, Anti NV that the news section has turned into flame-opulous. Some people even wished death(or joked about it), on Jen Huang, which is Ridiculously over the top or NV to go out of business. It was never this bad before and it started really when AMD started making a comeback. If you look at when the zero tolerance for flaming came into effect it was when AMD videocards became good again.

You keep talking about underbuilt VRMs... how do you know this is the problem? Quantities are purely thanks to TSMC promising a certain capacity and not delivering, not sure how you blame that on AMD/ATi. What are these "slag marketing tactics?" Quotes/links would be nice.

The funny part about you talking about AMD blaming others, that is where the blame actually lies. Nvidia on the other hand is purely blaming everyone but themselves for their problems, even though other manufacturers are NOT having the same problems. Ex- "We cannot release GF100 because 40nm is leaky and has too low of yields" but yet there are a handful of other GPUs on 40nm that might have had some problems but were/are being produced. "Bumpgate wasn't our fault, it was TSMC, AIBs, OEMs, etc." Yet they are the only ones with the problem...

Bringing up SKYMTL is sorta weird. Look at his post history, over the last few months he has almost nothing good to say about anything AMD/ATi related. His website is honestly quite neutral but for whatever reason that isn't being shown in his posts here.

Dude, I am pretty sure you were here more than a year ago when anything AMD/ATi was pretty much crapped on by the same dozen people flaming and trolling every single thread. Things were MUCH worse than the anti-Nvidia bias going on now on the forum. These things are constantly flip-flopping around but IMO it is not even close to as bad as the R600/RV670 time period.

Edit- Also AMD/ATi did take the blame on the Furmark/OCCT VRM problem on the 4 series. They said they didn't see the need to increase the cost and the price for the cards to statisfy an outlier of a situation and that has no effect on the actual operation/performance of the card.