cgminer is not doing any adjustment of anything. It sends the request to the driver. The driver says it has accepted the value for the profile. The hardware then gladly ignores you and although the profile now says the memory is 300, the GPU goes back to its default speed. This is why I made cgminer report back the actual values to you after you try to make a change. If it doesnt work it doesnt work.
This.
There are two ways to control a videocard:
* the right way
* and the hack way
The "right" way:Using the AMD driver library you can send requests tot he card. You can't control anything. The card is free to ignore or modify any request as it sees fit.
So it is more like this:
cgminer (via driver): "Video card #1 can you please change clock to 300 Mhz".
video card #1: "command is valid"
internal BIO check. 300Mhz is invalid, ignoring.
So why does AB "show" 300Mhz. It doesn't.
AB, GPU-Z (main tab), Trixx, etc show what the card has been
SET TO not what it is
RUNNING AT.
The only three places I have found to
always report correct values on what the card IS ACTUALLY RUNNING AT are:
* cgminer. If cgminer says a card is running at 300Mhz, 30 Ghz, or 0.1 Mhz it probably is right. It doesn't matter how weird you may think that is. I can't remember a single instance where cgminer turned out to be wrong.
* (windows) GPU-Z Sensor tab. Note the first tab shows what card is set at. That is useless. If you look on sensor tab it shows what card is running at.
* (linux) aticonfig
The "hack" way:So how do tools like AB change the clock? They bypass the drivers and write directly to the GPU BIOS. This is why it often requires a new version before AB will work with newly released cards. This also applies to things like how GPU-Z can read VRM temps or how radeonvolt can modify voltage beyond what is allowed by drivers. The problem with this method is that it isn't universal. RadeonVolt doesn't work on 5970 so I can't modify my voltage above what is allowed by GPU BIOS. Maybe someday someone will hack a solution together for Linux, maybe they never will.
The annoyance:Since so many hacks exist but aren't universal and bypass the drivers one would think AMD would expand the official drivers to allow full range of clock adjustments, voltage adjustments, and sensor data readings. Of course they won't. In the meantime you can flash a card with custom bios to make it do just about anything. Run at 100Mhz memclock, have "stock" core speed of 1.2Ghz, have a core voltage of 0.7V, etc. Granted you can also completely destroy the card in an non-warrantied manner but it is possible to change just about anything.