ShaneBaxtor.com

Last week MSI released a new version of its highly popular Afterburner software that gave us the ability to adjust the voltage of the core on the GTX 480. If you missed it there’s an article on TweakTown I did here of just how the whole process went and the performance boost we achieved.

Today it’s time for the current baby GTX 400 series to get the same treatment.

If you’re the owner of the GTX 470 and you want to get your voltage groove on you can head on over to the MSI website and download the latest version of Afterburner here. There version is 1.6.0 Beta 5.

MSI have told us today that you can set the voltage to MAX. I love that word; MAX!

Anyway the GTX 470 is sitting nicely in the testbed now; Afterburner 1.6.0 Beta 5 is installed and it’s time to see if we can make some magic happen.

Again you can download the latest version here; and this also gives you the ability to adjust the Voltage on the GTX 480.

This is very cool, very exciting and very much a rumour at the moment but it seems that HD 5830 is going to really begin to kick ass. Word is that some companies might want to create some noise by placing HD 5850 cores on the HD 5830 and giving people the ability to “unlock” some stream processors.

This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen this happen, we saw one company do it with the X800 at one stage and we also saw the HD 4830 get the same fate. You might have some mixed feelings on the HD 5830 at the moment but if this does indeed become true this will quickly become the “in” card to own.

When you look at the fact you’ll be able to get HD 5850 performance out of the box with probably a bios hack and then with an overclock get HD 5870 performance this card is going to become one of the hottest things on the market.

At the moment it’s only whispers but it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise. And honestly it would completely take the lime light away from NVIDIA because they won’t have anything that can compete with something like this.

Fingers cross it happens; if we get some more updates we’ll let you know.

In case you wonder how something like this would accidentally get through quality control word is: “….when the worker go to have a cup of coffee, the chance of happening increase dramatically” Always appreciate it when someone steps away from the work station for a moment

Recently we made mention about Galaxy working on a Dual GPU GTS 250 Video Card, while we made a slight jest at it due to the fact we figured Galaxy was probably only working on it because they where board it seems the model is very real.

While the card may look like a Dual PCB model now if you look carefully the second PCB is nothing more than a card which holds the three fans that the card uses. It also gives us a fair idea that the card going to take up at least three motherboard slots. When installed you can see the three fans run a blue LED setup and looks fairly nice. See images at the bottom of the page.

As for performance we can see that under 3DMark Vantage it manages to perform a little better than the older single GPU GTX 280. We can see that the card is overclocked to 675MHz on the core and the Shader Clock has been bumped to 1696MHz which helps improve performance overall. Having a look at the Xtreme Tuner HD software which is Galaxys own overclocking program we can see that the GU temp is only 45c, no doubt this is just idle though.

Since the GTS 250 is the highest end GPU that NVIDIA partners are currently working with it comes as no surprise that someone is trying to mix it up a bit in an effort to dump some cores.

We still have no information on any release date or retail pricing but as always we’ll keep you up to date if anything changes.

We’re not sure how popular a dual GPU GTS 250 would be but it’s always nice to see companies thinking outside the box.

Let me paint a picture, you’ve read my HD 5970 overclocking guide here at TweakTown and you can’t help but feel excited about the potential power that you’re able to achieve from it. So you  start going around and hunting one down, wondering which is the best to buy. So you go over to Newegg and find this. The XFX HD 5970 Black Edition, not only does it sound fancy but the price tag of $709.99 and the specification saying Core Clock 725 MHz (up to +30% with OverVolt Tool) and Memory Clock 4GHz (up to +20% with OverVolt Tool) make the whole product sound very exciting.

So everything looking good, the card arrives (probably after a month due to stock issues) you throw it in your system and figure since you’ve just thrown together a nice X58 testbed with 6GB of memory it’s time to install Windows 7 64-Bit and get into some serious gaming action over the holidays. So everything installed, drivers done, thrown on some games, ran a 3DMark to make sure everything’s where it should be and you say “Ok, I don’t need any more power, so let’s fire up the Special XFX Overvolt tool and overclock this sucka.” Because while you don’t need more power you want it.

Opening up the XFX Overvolt program you find yourself denied! Hmm this is weird you think, so you get in contact with XFX and the conversation goes a little like this. (This conversation involves Australian Dollars)

 [ 11/27/2009 7:11:49 AM] Registered my card, downloaded the overvolt tool, installed, .exe will only run under administrator, but it says “Sorry this tool does not support your video card” WTF $1200 video card and your software doesnt work?

[JEDY 11/27/2009 11:42:03 AM] Hi, thanks for your message,it is strange. could you tell us what bios version your card? thanks Jedy

[ 11/27/2009 11:46:25 AM] How can I tell that, would GPU-Z show that info? I have 2 more cards here from the same batch but they are for my customers, I hope they don`t have the same grief that I have had.

[JEDY 11/27/2009 11:52:53 AM] Hi,Thanks for the update.you can find the bios information from CCC. thanks Jedy

[ 11/30/2009 8:50:33 AM] Sorry for not replying over the weekend, we had other machines on the test bench, Bios Version 012.013.000.002 Bios Part Number 113-HD58-970-102 Bios Date 2009/11/11

[ 12/2/2009 7:29:12 AM] Its been a few days since I replied, any update on this?

[JEDY 12/3/2009 9:17:09 AM] Hi,Thanks for the update. this software can`t run under 64bit OS. thanks Jedy

[ 12/3/2009 10:11:32 AM] Why didnt you tell me this back in November, as if any power user would use 32bit OS these days. is the program from ATI written in 16bit, thats very old-school. Au$1200 Epic fail…

Epic Fail…..I don’t think I could put it better myself.

So if you’re hunting down a HD 5970 and you want to do some real overclocking with the assistance of the Overvolt tool, the HD 5970 from XFX might be worth avoiding for the moment. Not only is it overly expensive at  $709.99 but technically you could go as far to say it’s falsely advertised. Considering XFX consider themselves a bit of a performance company it’s disappointing, or as our friend so delicately put it, an Epic Fail.

It’s something worth noting as the last thing you want to do is get home and find that the software you need to really get full advantage of the model isn’t going to work on your computer. Apart from the ATI branded HD 5970 I’ve tested a Sapphire one and Gigabyte one, both worked with the readily available ATI branded Overvolt program.