7900GT BIOS question

[ElementalDragon]

Ok... i tried asking this over at Guru3D (which by the way their forums are kinda biased... since it basically bleeps out MVKTech). hopefully someone here will have some useful input about my question.

I now have 2 Zalman VF900's on my 7900GT's.... and i'm kinda thinkin about overclocking them. the problem is...... my video cards i believe are the earlier eVGA versions that are running at the standard voltage of i think it was 1.2v. i downloaded the BIOS for my card (7900GT CO SC), and downloaded the one for Revision 6 (which i'm assuming is the revision number of the card), and looked at the bios with NiBiTor, and it showed 1.45v in 3D mode. my first question is.... does anybody know if there's a surefire way i can figure out exactly what revision number of cards i have? my second question is..... if i upgrade the BIOS of my cards to the one i downloaded..... would it actually run at 1.45v, or would i still have to do some sort of volt mod, be it pencil or actual wire? Supposedly, with 1.2v, i'll only probably be able to gain about 20mhz on the core. 1.45 allows much higher.

 

[ElementalDragon]

hmm..... guess i shoulda put this in the Graphics Cards topic...... coulda swore i did though. could a mod move it there... and delete this post if you want as well?

 

[LeeJend]

They made a hardware change to mod the cards from their basic verison to the "overclcoked" Signature version. That means the bios update probably won't work unless you have the Signature series card.

Reading the posts on stability of overclocked 7900 GT's why would you want to? The latest Bioses are downclocking the factory overclocked cards to get rid of artifacts. Not a good recommendation for the cards. And BTW the new bios slams the fans on full speed all the time, even in 2D, which gets noisy.

What is your card clocked at now? 670 Mhz is the new recommended max from Nvidia. They are getting way too many returns from artifacts.

 

[ElementalDragon]

right now..... 550/790.... the default factory overclocked overclock on the eVGA 7900GT CO SC. 670mhz is supposedly only achievable at 1.45v. at i think 1.2v.... which is what they used to normally be at, i think they said you could only really get to 560-580 before problems arise. and i'm running two VF900's..... so i wouldn't have to worry about that fan problem.

Also, from what i've read, that whole artifacting thing that caused all the RMA's was a screwed up setting in the bios's that were on the cards. i forget exactly what the setting was.... but you can find out about it on Guru3D's forums..... think it was in a thread titled something like "How i stopped my 7900GT artifacting".