I wouldn't brag about those, the fans are running at 3000-4000 rpm. That shit sounds like a vacuum cleaner.
Wrong, I got a shapphire 5870 vapour X here that runs 3000+ rpm and its noisy. I have loads of shapphire 5850 extremes and they are all set to 100% @ 4400RPM and they are WAY QUIETER than the single 5870 doind 4000RPM. 2 rigs of 4 all on 100% and there quiet. YOu forgot that theres many types/makes/qualities of parts, and fans are a gulf of different ideas.
On topic, the 5870 does 1010/300(no volt mod) and all 5850's reach 1000/300@ 1.93V except 1 which is VERY close. THe best does 1015/300 @ stock! Its a crazy card but it does just that. Highering the volyage on it doesnt make much difference. Seems 1015 is the ceiling and upping the V doesnt matter. Still, 1015/300 stock
i have them all on 965/300 @1.87V mainly, so they last! lol
1015 out of a 5830 is very impressive
Messhead - am I reading you right here??? 5850 extremes @ 1.93V or 1.87V
??
You know I've got the same cards as you, we had that thread with yours and my pictures of the two different types of 5850 Extreme (i.e. top placement / side placement of power sockets etc.). We bought them at around the same time.
I get around 375 MH/sec at a conservative 900 MHz core clock. But I run stock voltage, and AMDOverdriveCtrl tells me the stock voltage is 1.088V. So in my 'overclock' settings file, I set the core voltage to 1.088V.
This suggests that you are over volting your cards by around 0.8V - for the mathematically disadvantaged (not you) that is getting on for *nearly doubling* the voltage.
I'm not calling you a liar. I'm asking WTF is going on. Doubling the voltage usually causes destruction - so is your voltage reading wrong, or mine, or does the Extreme *really* let you up the voltage by 0.8V
? Seriously mate - I may not be getting over 400 MH/sec from my 5850 Extremes (as you claim they 'all' can) but at 0.8V less per card, I must be using a shitload less electricity, surely?
And whilst I'd like to test out your theory of the >400 MH/sec by upping the voltage, I'm a bit nervous about whacking 1.87V into a card that has been hashing away at 1.088V since I bought it.....
WTF is going on mate??? Sounds like one of our tools is fecked - I run Linux, IIRC you're a Windowz chap so the tools are different, but the APIs should be the same inside FFS - this is weird...
Anyone else with a 3-month-old 5850 Extreme bought from OCUK here? Please can you verify the *standard* voltage the cards run at?
I don't think I've uncovered some awesome new undervolting trick to save power - my shelf rig is eating exactly 2000W at the moment, but that's 12 cards and 3833 MH/sec, so only 1.92 MH/W. Not bad for a bag-o-bones, but not brilliant. I haven't done any further undervolting or overclocking yet though - the 5830s I *know* will hit 300 MH/s, and the 5850s *definitely* do 375, so I can add 25 to every one of these cards, but at what power cost? Best find out
Aye, I wanna know too. He refers to the 1.87 as stock on certain cards. Sounds very, very high. The 5830 extremes I am running now came 1.178 stock, so maybe he left out the 1, I lower mine with a bios mode to lock them down to 1.165, which tricks trixx into dropping them another few points when I lower it to trixx lowest of 1.163.(Note the 1.156 in screenie) Should be 1.187 for 5850 and 1.193 for 5870. All will vary a bit depending on brand and whether or not the Manu. OC'd or customzied the bios, volts, etc, etc.
For your cards, Catfish, I always recommend NOT upping the volts as you are testing OC. Most of them ATI and Nvidia alike seem to be able to handle much higher clocks at their stock volts than what they would if we were using them for gaming. I.e. maxing out the vrams, which would most certainly need more juice over the GPU reqs. I up the clocks as far as they will go stable at stock volts, carefully monitoring temps and screen artifacts. I have found in my own toying that once you reach screen artifacts all the extra volts in the world will not make the GPU go any faster. Though, with lowering the volts at that point I have been able to sneak in a few more Hz, but not with stable mining and the amps jump up like nuts. All of that will vary by card brand, cooling layout, PSU quality, OS, ICH efficiency, etc, etc, etc.. And, yea the 58xx serious is definetly a rarity, atlerast for the model lines most of us are using in their clocking abilities. I hear rumor the last run of 58xx chips made recently are not doing nearly as well.
In fact you can likely lower your voltage a good bit since you are not OCing or are OCing very little. It should improve your MH/W ratio a bit.
One last thing, the cards you 2 were comparing with the power inputs on different locations. Generally, top-in is reference or atleast reference design and the back-in ones are custom board layouts from whoever actually manufactured them. Reference usually beats the pants off of the others in terms of durability, OCability, etc.
Cheers
ARS is amazing compared to all the others. Guy uses amazon for servers, think he needs a new provider 
