Does the red line in the first graph indicate a problem?

[s4in7]

Never used AMD System Monitor before, but TMonitor was displaying the wrong clockspeed so I gave it a try. I loaded Unigine Heaven and ran it Extreme for 30 seconds or so, then quickly exited to desktop to check AMD System Monitor and I don't know what that red line is in the first graph--is it GPU utilization or something to do with the CPU? Why does it shoot up and down so fast and does that indicate some sort of throttling?

I reverted to stock clocks on the CPU and GPUs and I'm still getting th is red line quickly rising and falling :/ My temps are all in check, never breaking 50c at load. GPUs max out at about 70c after running Heaven for a while.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[nikoli707]

the red line at the top looks like its just showing your clocks for the gpu compared to all the green colors for thecores on the cpu. it does look like the gpu was throttling though but thats somewhat normal. its not hurting anything if thats what your asking. as long as your temps were all in check with 50c and 70c respectively are more than fine, your good to go.

 

[s4in7]

Okay that makes sense, but why would it throttle if I'm within the thermal thresholds? I have a Thermaltake TR2 850w PSU so I know they're getting enough juice.

I disabled Crossfire and ran Heaven again and got this even stranger result,

eaven FPS was exactly half of what it is when Crossfire is enabled (20fps single vs. 40fps Crossfire in the first scene)

 

[nikoli707]

yeah it sure looks like its throttling. what model card do you have? do you have msi afterburner? i would download the latest afterburner beta 18 and look at the its hardware monitor and check the temps and what it reports your core clock to be during valley or heaven.

 

[s4in7]

Okay I think I fixed it. I brought my CPU back to 4.5Ghz and I disabled AMD Overdrive in CCC and now I get this:

No dips at all (that last and only dip was when I quit the program and went back to Desktop).

I have one XFX 270X as the primary and one Visiontek 270X as the linked adapter. They both have the same memory clock but the core clock is 30mhz higher on the Visiontek (1050 for the XFX vs. 1080 for the Visiontek)--do you think this is why they can't handle even a mild overclock without throttling?

 

[s4in7]

I installed the latest beta 18 of Afterburner and set the clocks there instead of CCC, and according to Afterburner I'm not throttling at all anymore. Is this believable?

 

[nikoli707]

yes that is believe able. you can keep pushing the core clock up there until either you hit 80c and start throttling or you crash when running heaven. you can also try going into the settings and unlocking voltage control if its available for your model cards and their not voltage locked.

 

[nikoli707]

double post