I recently bought an MSI 7970 OC. It's a reference design card and it's supposed to be voltage unlocked (even says so on the box). I do have access to voltage control in Afterburner, but I have a suspicion that, for some reason, the voltage isn't changing, even if I tweak it in Afterburner. I'm thinking this for two reasons: 1) because my voltage in GPU-z is always significantly lower than what Afterburner says and 2) because increasing voltage in Afterburner doesn't help me improve my max overclock at all. I max out at 1150 on stock volts and increasing voltage up to 1.3v does nothing to help me improve on that. Have you guys ever came across a problem like this?
The thing is that they are many things that comes into play. Like for the GTX 600 series, your OC doesn't apply... yet... only when you push the GPU, and the GPU THINKS it can do it, it will go up to what you specified. So it gives the illusion that the OC software doesn't work. So maybe this is what is happening. Also, another factor is that GPU-Z doesn't know the voltage. The GPU drivers returns a voltage value closest to the frequencies of a power state profile. So in your case max speed. Of course it could also be that AfterBurner is broken.
I haven't done a clean install of Win7 for a year now. I wonder if there's a software conflict somewhere?
Its more of a driver conflict. AfterBurner and EVGA Precision are just wrappers over Nvidia and AMD driver API codec, which is only distributed to select developer (MSI, and EVGA for example). So, it could be a driver conflict.
That would make sense because I've installed numerous versions of AB over the past year, along with CCC, Trixx, HIS Turbo, etc, etc. I might try a non-destructive re-install. EDIT: Fwiw, I just noticed there's a voltage monitoring option in AB, so I enabled it and did a loop of Heaven. No matter what I set the voltage to, AB shows that it never goes above 1.187v. I'm pretty sure I don't have control of this voltage for some reason.
