Help overclocking my AMD radeon hd 6850 (voltage mainly)

dmartelli84

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Hey all. I've been gettin half-way decent at messin around with OCing my AMD radeon hd 6850. Ive had mixxed results so far. I use MSI afterburner and my AMD vision control center. I use afterburner to tweak the core and mem clocks, and to moniter all the stats. And i use AMD to tweek things on my card like AA and stuff like that when needed.
Now i am still a total noob. I need to know what types of ratios i should use. Like: How much memory clock should i use when i set x amount of core clock. Also, my main question is voltage. I can get this baby to run with stock voltage at 940 coreclock and 1150 mem clock. Any higher and it crashes. I'd like to try and get it up to a nice 1000 or 1050 coreclock. so afew questions:

1 If im gonna be running between 1000 and 1050 coreclock, what should i set the mem clock to? should i just leave it at the cool 1150?

2 What the hell is the stock voltage for this card?? i cant figure it out! haha.Around what voltage should i set it to for optimal performance at 1000-1050 coreclock?

3 Will uping the voltage a little help control the heat of the overworking card as its performing in OC?

4 What are some good programs to use to help me moniter all this dangerous stuff and test it?

Thanks, hope to hear from ya guys
 
And the aim is to OC the card I believe?
I would give you a quote straight from another post from another forum, which, I have posted here before too...
"You can just flash your HD 6850 to the HD 6870 bios instead, this way the clocks are raised and voltage providing a decent stable overclock. I found the best bios for my XFX HD 6850 XXX was the stock XFX HD 6870 bios, now my card is 900Mhz core 1050 Mem 24/7 stable. Hope this helps you out :)

Update : This bios (Link below) is by far the best so far, keeps the card cooler than the stock bios, doesn't go over 75c even during Furmark. 930Mhz Core clock aswell. I f you have the same card as me, recommend this bios :)

http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/95595/MSI.HD6870.1024.101230.html"
Credited to Boomstick777
 

dmartelli84

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Thanks for the reply! It was suggested to me before to flash the bios. Im not very interested in doing it though. I have all the utensils i need with MSI afterburner and the radeon 6850 has the capasity to go beyond 930Hzcore. Im actually running my hd 6850 now at 940Hhz core and 1150 Mhz memory. Its stable and doesnt go over 77C. Im looking to go up to 1000 Mhz. so i really need to know the stock voltage of my card and what i could really boost it up to.
 

deadjon

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At 77C I would refrain from going any higher.

Maybe if this was a 6970 I would say push it for another 10C but its only a little 6850. Don't kill the poor thing.

They are blisteringly fast cards for the price though - I ALWAYS invest in 6850s when designing budget builds for friends (I found the i3 2100 + H61 + 4GB DDR3 1333mhz 6850 + CX430 PSU is plenty enough to convert a console gamer into a PC gamer :p)
 

dmartelli84

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Well one of my questions was, if iadd alittle more voltage will it help to balance out the temp?
 

kcsmacker

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No increasing the voltage will increase the heat even more and increasing the performance after the voltage increase will increase heat even more. Unless you take off the stock cooler an water cool it or find some amazing air cooling aftermarket cooler for your GPU i WOULD NOT RECOMMEND that you go any higher. I would says 77c is about as far as you want to go for a healthy long living GPU. Many way up to 85 or 90 is ok but thats really pushing it and more then likely slowly killing your GPU.

Good luck and hope this helped
 

SternHuang

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There is a difference between the 6850 and 6870 though. The 6850 only has 960 stream processors while the 6870 has 1120 stream processors. I'm not exactly a computer engineer but wouldn't a 6850 OCed to the specs of a 6870 still be slower?

Its been a few months since your post, but now there are pre-overclocked 6850s on sale. Most of them seem to set the core clock from 775 MHz to somewhere between 820 and 860 MHz and the memory clock from 1000 MHz to somewhere between 1050 MHz and 1100 MHz. Though this is quite a bit less than what OP wanted, would it not be a safe setting to overclock the card to?

TL;DR: pre-overclocked cards are:
core clock : 775 --> 820~860
mem clock: 1000 --> 1050~1100
should be a good standard overclock?