Back into the PC Master Race. It was never a total absence but still.

[Shifty Geezer]

I didn't try those, but I wonder if the numbers are right and if I am not going to create instability to the system.

If it does, change them until they're stable.

According to MSI Afterburner, the graphics card, a MSI Radeon RX 570 Armor 4G OC 4GB GDDR5, can go up to:

+50% power limit
1650MHz core clock
2250MHz Memory clock

As you probably know, every chip/card is different. Just keep playing with the settings until you get a stable system at the speed and temperature you're happy with, is how overclocking goes. You need trial-and-error, which makes it an enthusiast pursuit for PC tinkerers.

 

[Cyan]

If it does, change them until they're stable.
As you probably know, every chip/card is different. Just keep playing with the settings until you get a stable system at the speed and temperature you're happy with, is how overclocking goes. You need trial-and-error, which makes it an enthusiast pursuit for PC tinkerers.

any suggestion for a stress test? With those settings, according to DF the RX 570 would be mid point between the RX 480 and RX 580, with 260GB/s of bandwidth. Their card in the review is limited to +25% power limit, mine is at +50%. However I am planning on limiting the voltage -not so much the power output-, so the card can breathe.

This is DF video on the card, basically the reason I went with this GPU:

 

[Shifty Geezer]

any suggestion for a stress test?

Not my domain. There'll be overclocking experts here who can help.

 

[Bludd]

prime95 is always good
You can also try LinX

eh, I realise you might have meant GPU stress testing, I don't have any suggestions except Furmark for GPU stressing

 

[entity279]

For gpus, when i used to do o/c I'd use regular games for testing. Turned out that running 3dMark or furmark was fine. Running the oringinal Farcry though revealed video artifacts everywhere.

So you can still go with such benchmarks (furmark, occt, 3dmark) to quickly check that the board works at all in 3d. But other than that, since these are not CPUs, small errors won't cost you anything. You may consider any oc valid if your favorite games run ok on it

 

[Davros]

If your getting a solid 60fps I'd leave overclocking alone

 

[Rodéric]

Don't overclock, it's more trouble than it's worth IMO.

 

[mrcorbo]

Don't overclock, it's more trouble than it's worth IMO.

I disagree. I have always overclocked. Moderate overclocks are almost always problem-free and are effectively stealing performance. Chasing every last MHz, I'd agree, is probably more trouble than it's worth unless the overclock itself is the goal.

 

[entity279]

Stealing performance that often offers no tangible gains (in gaming) as mentioned by posters above as well.

I'd overclock however if I were using the PC for folding, mining or I'd be compiling/building software frequently, encoding audio/video..

 

[mrcorbo]

Stealing performance that often offers no tangible gains (in gaming) as mentioned by posters above as well.

I'd overclock however if I were using the PC for folding, mining or I'd be compiling/building software frequently, encoding audio/video..

I have a ~25% overclock on my CPU. The gains are tangible as hell. In everything. And yes, for my particular CPU, that's a moderate overclock.

Edit: Had to edit that percentage, since I was looking at the wrong Xeon and therefore the wrong base clock. Still a ~25% clock increase across 6 physical cores is not insignificant and there is a noticeable improvement in the overall responsiveness of the system when overclocked via BCLK vs not.

 

[mrcorbo]

double post

 

[entity279]

That may be, but the discussion was mainly about GPU o/c. There the point was that once you've reached consistent 60fps (or whatever the monitor refresh rate) there's not much gain in overclocking .

You seemed to have doged that. I've addressed it to an extent with my folding example.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But you never hit a completely stable 60 fps. And if you do, you can up the quality a bit more. So yeah, in theory, but in reality overclocking gives you free performance, and these days you can do it with the system tools to a basic degree without stress or aggro or a risk of frying your PC. So it's definitely something worth spending 5 minutes pushing the 'optimise for performance' button on whatever tool you have and then tweaking to get fan noise : performance where you want it.

 

[Cyan]

But you never hit a completely stable 60 fps. And if you do, you can up the quality a bit more. So yeah, in theory, but in reality overclocking gives you free performance, and these days you can do it with the system tools to a basic degree without stress or aggro or a risk of frying your PC. So it's definitely something worth spending 5 minutes pushing the 'optimise for performance' button on whatever tool you have and then tweaking to get fan noise : performance where you want it.

Ended up overclocking, but not much. I went all the way once just to see what happened and the screen went crazy, had to restart. I also tried values that went overbudget and Global Wattman by AMD doesn't let it go over 150W of power consumption. So I am limited and it's ok. :smile2:

I did a moderate overclocking of like 3% (from 1268 original to 1307) for the core clock and 12% for the memory clock (1750 to 1975), this one being a bit more stressful, but I checked and until 2000-2010 it runs, though I don't want to risk it. I spent more time running tests than overclocking. Firestrike (3D Mark) gives me 10347 score without overclocking.:smile2:

Also tried Sky Diver (3D Mark) and downloaded Unity Heaven benchmark but haven't installed it yet.

The CPU is overclocked from 3.5GHz to 3.7GHz, it doesn't complain and I am not increasing that.

 

[Cyan]

Sky Diver (3D Mark benchmark) scores 24819 with overclock.

 

[shiznit]

Welcome back! Get a variable refresh rate monitor ASAP!

 

[Cyan]

Welcome back! Get a variable refresh rate monitor ASAP!

it's one of the plans I have, to get a 4k monitor with FreeSync once Vega is out, specially if I find a Vega card that runs fine without having to change my 450W power supply.

 

[mrcorbo]

That may be, but the discussion was mainly about GPU o/c. There the point was that once you've reached consistent 60fps (or whatever the monitor refresh rate) there's not much gain in overclocking .

You seemed to have doged that. I've addressed it to an extent with my folding example.

The comment I was responding too didn't specify GPU overclocking, but sure, in context, let's assume that that was what was meant. I still disagree. As Shifty points out, the "cost" isn't significant, so the benefit doesn't have to be significant either to be worth it. My Zotac 1060 mini with its barely adequate cooler is running at +200 MHz on the GPU clock and +400 MHz on the memory with normal temps and complete stability. Even if that nets me one game where I can bump up one quality setting while maintaining 60fps than it was absolutely worth the minimal effort it took to achieve that.

 

[Cyan]

settled the overclock at 1310-1320 range -from 1268 original-, which is like the sweet spot in my card, although it doesn't complain much at 1400MHz.., when you run a demanding benchmark or game sometimes it stops producing frames for that game although the OS and everything else keeps running, so I don't want to risk it just for a bunch of frames.

I've been playing the PC version of Phantom Dust, a remaster of the original Xbox game. It is just the same game at 1080p 60 fps. A really well optimized game. While running at 1080p all the time, the GPU was at 300MHz regardless, as when you are browsing the internet or on the desktop, which says a lot about the good optimisation of the game.

Next test is going to be my favourite Gamecube game from when I had the Gamecube, F-Zero GX. I wonder if I can lock it at 60 fps.

 

[Cyan]

F-Zero GX tested. Finally I can play it like the original on my Gamecube, at 60 fps using Dolphin emulator. What's most impressive is that I can play both at 4k "external", and 4k internal (the 640x528 resolution of the original multiplied proportionally, so it runs at 3840x3168) and 60 fps, plus AFx16. The game looks very good. Most of all, what's surprising is the fact that the PC remains silent, :smile2:the fans don't spin like when the CPU and GPU are stressed, unlike in benchmarks and demanding games. I mention this because I remember that my notebook couldn't run this game at more than 5fps on Dolphin, even at low or lower than original resolution, and my previous laptop which had a i5-2450m CPU couldn't run the game at more than 10-15 fps whatever the resolution, and when I tried the fan kept spinning at the craziest speed it could achieve, it was so annoying, not to mention unplayable.

4k and 60 fps without a single hitch and the PC runs it as it was nothing using DirectX 11, never thought Dolphin is that optimised.

Since I settled the overclock settings to something like 3% overclock, I performed a test with the final settings and this is the result.