I used the Fermi BIOS Editor to adapt my own BIOS. One advantage is that I reset the resting voltage to 935mV from 963mV. This had to be done at the BIOS level as MSI Afterburner could only adjust the voltage when under load. Saved me an extra 5W from the mains which adds up over time!
Got the editor now, it has to run in a 32bit environment though so I need to sort something I can boot into to run it. Also re-TIM'd the hot card and its the same temp as the other now (still 90 at full load on air ).
Much depends on your case airflow, especially where SLI is concerned. I'd play with one card at a time and find optimal BIOS settings for both.
How many slot do you have between the cards? Unfortunatey all the aftermarket coolers are 2.5-3 slots, so if you've got just 2 slots you're stuck with the stock cooler.
It's an RV02 so airflow is definitely not a problem. Ideally, I want to a get watercooling back in the case at some point. Only one slot currently. I need to have a look at the specs of the board (P8P67 Pro) and see if I can run the second card in one of the other ports OK.
The heatpipes are designed to work on the horizontal so you might not get the best performance on the vertical plane especially when talking GTX 480s. Spacing on an ASUS P8P67 should be just fine. Have a play with voltages and see how you get on.
So last night I was playing around with the vCore on my 480’s and discovered that mine appears to be 1.100v at stock levels. This is quite high no? I can run at 890Mhz on the core, but under extreme stress I get sporadic crashes (ie: can play/bench for hours, with no problem, then it’ll crash, I don’t get this at 850Mhz so I’m running that right now). I pushed the vCore to 1.250 and 950Mhz but got uber artifacting and locking up, and for a while thought I had killed my GPU as it happened every time I booted into windows – had to go into safe mode, stop the Nvidia drivers and MSI afterburner from booting and then uninstall MSI afterburner to get it all back to normal. Panic over (and yes, there was plenty of panic) What has everyone else found the maximum vCore levels are for their cards? This guy over on the Rag3d forums reckons he has 950Mhz at 1.138V, so I'm going to dial that in tonight and see how I go.
My card doesn't respond well to high voltage because it gets too hot - stock voltage is 1013mV and if I go as high as 1138mV it just starts to roast. The cooler is very (VERY) good, but the temperature/voltage curve is exponential and beyond a certain point the GPU simply turns into a nuclear reactor. I had a similar panic situation when I was stability testing a 900MHz OC, and during Furmark my monitor turned off and displayed the ominous "No signal to monitor" message. Pants were shat that day! I have since kept the card at stock, and despite many promises to Blogins I STILL haven't managed to set aside some time to reduce volts for stock clocks. Will try to do it soon.
So i had a little 'incident' with my SOC last night. I'd done a couple of runs in heaven for comparison against an oc'd 460 in the 460 appreciation thread. with my SOC at it's standard clock of 820mhz, i got fairly close to the score om my previous stock 480@850mhz (833vs852). So, I figured I'd have a little fun with the sliders and see what I could get. Bad idea.... Halfway through a heaven run the screen went black. "No Signal" said my tv. Hit reset, still no signal. PSU off and on and power up, nothing. PSU off, press the power button like a mad man, wait, PSU back on, power on and..... IT'S ALIVE! Then after half an hour of playing F1 Online, poof! Gone again. It was midnight, I was tired, I had to be up early so naturally I decided to strip it down and give it a good clean I wish I'd done this as soon as I got the card, case what i found was not a pretty sight Some extremely ganky thermal paste and enough dust bunnies to keep the most horny of rabbits happy. AND the thremal pads weren't covering all the ram. Not good Armed with an old tooth brush, some kitchen roll, TIM cleaner and some cotton buds, I cleaned every inch of the card, completely dismantling the fan housing to get in all the nooks and crannies. After an hour of detailing my card was funky fresh again I also cut the longer thermal pad up to make sure all the vram was getting cooled I spot of MX-4 on the core (strewth that sturff is viscous, but then again anything is compared to Zalman STG-1) and eh voila! I didn't know the fans were clear! Temps have improved nicely, maxing at 75C in heaven where as before it's get to 82-85 and furmark leveled out at 92C, where before it was still climbing fast when in the high 90's and I had to quit. It's still noisy as hell, but water will soon fix that Interestingly, although the core voltage is specified at 1.068v, while running furmark it hit 1.111 according to gigabytes OC guru and confirmed in the GPUz log. I don't know if this is programmed into the bios or something the oc guru takes upon itself to do, but it could explain the high temps. Will need further investigation!
Wahey another person who thought they had killed their card but in fact didn't at all! Good to see its working. Isn't cleaning up a heatsink amazingly satisfying?
It's been a little sketch since i got it but didn't bother doing anything as i thought i'd have it on water already, but money and laziness has got in the way. lol
Shoot man... I shouldn't have encouraged anyone to destroy my 460 scores. But thanks for the reference. I'm pretty happy with my scores and after looking at what I play and the fps in those. I'm happy that with 2x aa and most everything turned up is good enoough for now. (although bdigital has quite a good looking card there... white and everything) Money and laziness are pretty much the two things that have got me this far!!! Huh?
Join us! 480's aren't as unweildlly as they're made out to be. I had a gellid icy vision on my last one which kept it to 70C tops while still being nice and quiet, even when overclocked to 850! Get it on water and you're lookin at enough power to destroy a small planet! Oh and Parge, my apologies for not repplying to this before, yes it is immensely satisfying and theraputic. Also to seeing the intricate detail of the hsf gave me a new level of respect for the designers. Putting one of these together should be in the intelligence round on krypton factor! lol
If my insurance claim or my eBay items fetch enough I will surely join. I'm pretty sure my psu can take it... And idle ain't that bad. Plus I'd do the bios mod like blogins to reduce idle consumption. I have enough on my credit card for some extra cooling also... 140 rad me thinks extra to make up for the big ol thirsty.
Yeh the PSU will take it easily. I only had a 620w before and a far more power hungry mobo and Core2quad with a decent overclock on it. With furmark and prime95 running (and the 480 oc's to 800) it maxed out at 600W. What wc have you got at the moment? NZXT's websie has some pretty nice pics showing possible loop setups
