Bitcoin Forum

12.6+ AMD drivers do not let you change the memory speed of 7xxx (7950, 7970, etc) cards below a certain threshold.  To underclock memory, use Afterburner and a dll file.

1) Install MSI afterburner.
2) Download this dll file (http://www.multiupload.nl/WL63GL55KM) and place it in your Afterburner directory.
3) Edit the afterburner config text according to this thread (http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=338906) and set unofficial overclocking mode to 2.
4) Run MSI Afterburner.
5) Set the overclocking mode to kernel instead of software in settings.
6) Underclock memory as per usual.

It took me a long time to figure this out from various threads, so hopefully now people will find it easy.  This also allows you to overclock memory above the overdrive maximum.

Thx for the hint.
I passed and installed linux, but now i can go back :)

+1 tacotime

now i`m able to lower the memory to 525 on my single 68xx card

dangit tacotime... if ANYBODY on this forum deserves donations thrown at them on a daily basis.. you are one of the few!

Great guide. I am now rocking lowish memory speeds (like 500-600ish, not sure how some folk are getting 200...)

If you have multiple cards just switch between them while applying the memclock changes each time. The slider will reset.

If you only have one card then you will have to close afterburner and restart it after each memclock adjustment.

^^  yup.

the weird thing is that works for some cards and not others.  i have an xfx 7950 that works fine on, but my gigabyte 7950 will only go down to 650mhz alone.  if i put both cards in a system i can use that trick to underclock the memory of the xfx card and then check off the box that says "use the same settings for similar cards" to get the gigabyte card's memory down, but otherwise i can't.

That is really weird. I have never had a card that couldn't be adjusted that way.

Maybe its a BIOS limitation?  Did you ever check to see what the lowest setting for memclock in the BIOS is using RBE?

On my 6870 and 7950 I have to set the memory in afterburner to lowest (640?), then close it, reopen then I can set it lower down to 300 :)

On my Club-3D HD6870x2, I have to do the same and its working.
But on my Club-3D HD7970, I can not go down! The driver crash allways.

If you close afterburner after setting the lowest mem clock, then reopen, you can slide the memory down further. I open and close Afterburner twice to get my 7970 memclocks down to 185.

This isn't working for me with 12.8 and MSI Afterburner 2.2.4 on 7970s of all different types... I put the DLL file in the MSI folder... Any ideas?  I get limits at 700 and 685, depending on the card...

THANK YOU FOR THE HELP!!!
-EP

Go into the MSI program folder, and delete all the files in the PROFILES folder.

There is a reason for limiting the underclock...

..if you underclock memory too far you end up with a computer that won't boot up!  ;D

How to use MSI Afterburner...
At the bottom are some numbers 1 2 3 4 5 this is where you can store your settings.
There is a tick box to apply your setting at startup (don't tick this until you are sure it works)
In "advance settings menu" MSI lets you switch between multiple cards to change each one and also unlock the safty settings.

good stuff. need to try it soon.

Crazy weird... I have two setups, almost identical...  Miner1 has 2x Asus 7970 with an old Intel chipset, Miner2 has 2x Asus 7970 with the 990 AMD chipset.  Miner 1 allows me to underclock memory, but miner 2 wont work!  I've copied and pasted the CFG files, neither of the rigs has catalyst control center installed, and they both have 12.8...  Perplexed...

-EP

yeah, i'm not sure why stuff like that is.  the ability to control the memory speeds of the cards has been really wacky in afterburner since 12.6+ drivers.  You may want to report it as a bug.

Hmmm. I WOULD do this, But my hashrate starts to crap out when my memclock goes below 740...

Play with the settings then. I'm at 1050,410 on my 7970, and it takes a full ~2 minutes to finally stabilize at a hashrate, but it's pretty stable.

crazyates, what is your hash rate at 1050/410?  I'm currently using 1050/300 and getting 631 Mh/s.  Just trying to compare.

You're using a weird kernel or APP SDK version then.  All of my 7970s run at 340Mhz, and the hashrate is pegged.  In fact, I'm sure it could run lower (but I don't know how stable it would be).

630MH/s. 12.8, but with the 12.10 OCL runtime.

What APP SDK are you using? 1050/410 with 12.8 and 12.10 OCL runtime is only getting me around 593 Mh/s

:s im getting 555ish
CGminer Diablo v1 w256 I:7

Static intensity of 11 appears to have brought me up around 630

That's a great result!  I'm get ~690MH running at 1170/1020.

I know slower mem would drop temps, but MSIA is a PITA.   :P

EDIT: This is on a proxy pool not using stratum.

I have 692 Mh at 1150/1000.

How many threads, and at what intensity?

Ace` on slush's pool gets 725mh/s with a msi 7970...i thought he was bs'in but he did produce a screenshot with miner n clock speed of 1150 dunno how he does it...and that's just with cgminer I9...my 7970 can only do bout 660mh/s at 1150 :(

Its easy to get abnormally high or low readings with Slush's. Especially right after a block has been found.

My 460 mhash/s 7870 once clocked in at 800+ mhash/s.  lol

do you think he sat there and waited for a new block? just so he could bs about it?

It was probably an honest mistake.

Join Slush's pool with any gpu and see for yourself.

ANY 300-700 mhash/s gpu will be easily tossed around when its up against a 3.2+ Thash/s proportional pool.

I have done all this, but I can't go lower than 685MHz on my Sapphire 7970 (Afterburner won't let me).

I use:
Windows7 64bit
MSI Afterburner 2.3.1
Catalyst 13.1

What might be the problem?

Clost MSI AB. Go into the program folder, and delete everything in the "Profiles" folder. Reopen MSI AB, and your slider should reset to middle at whatever clock rate you left it off at. It will ask you to reboot, and just choose no.

I already did this (you already described this earlier in this thread).

After I reopen Afterburner my slider is on the left side, at 685MHz. It's not possible to move it any further to the left.

Wait! No! crazyates, you are a genius! I only deleted all profile-files in the profile folder. But you said everything. After I also deleted the .cfg file in the profiles folder it worked.

Thank you so much!

AB can be a finicky program, but once you whip it into control, it can be pretty damn awesome. Glad it's working for you!

I have a strange problem with MSI AB and TRIXX, actually I have to use both.

everytime I have to open TRIXX first to undervolt all my cards.
and than open AB to adjust clock settings.

the reason I have to do it this way is because I found the

clock setting in TRIXX doesn't work with my cards,
the undervolt in AB doesn't work with my cards.

I can tell because
if I set the clock here in TRIXX,  my 7950 hash rate will never pass 500, but
if I set the same clock in AB, my hash rate will be 520
or
if I set undervolt value in MSI only, my card temp will go up to 75-80, but
if I set undervolt value in TRIXX first, my card temp will be 66-68

this problem exist in three different systems I use, (win 7 32bit, 64 bit and win 8 64bit)
my cards are all powercolor 7950 reference.

Does it have anything to do with the BIOS switch on the card? I am setting all cards to 2 now.

Have you tried this: Go into the AB settings, and tell AB to "Force Constant Voltage"

I saw this option like million of times, but don't have knowledge what it does
I am going to try it now see if it works.

thanks crazyates

report back,
it works now and finally I can uninstall TRIXX and use only MSI AB  :D

Most cards have a dynamic voltage, but some are controlled by hardware, and some by software. My Gigabyte 7970 Windforce has this, and neither CGMiner nor MSI AB could set the voltage, and have it stick. Forcing a constant voltage is sort of like turning off the power saving features when you're overclocking a CPU. It Forces a constant voltage (doh), regardless of the clock speed. This means that at 300MHz or 1100MHz, your core will be running at the same 1.05V (or whatever you set it to). On my 7970, this was the option that finally let me control the voltages on my 7970.

I should have googled and learned it :-\

now all my 7950s are working at 1.063/1000/625 happily
and my only XFX 7850 seems has a locked voltage  >:(, so now it's funny to see that it does less work but with the highest temp of 74C
other 7950s are all below 70C

Why do I need Afterburner at all? Can I not just use cgminers "--gpu-memclock" flag to underclock my memory?

You can, but there are limitations. CGMiner uses the official ATI ADL, which has limitations. Specifically, you cannot set the memory speed lower than 150MHz lower than the core speed. For my 7970 @ 1100MHz, this means CGMiner cannot set the memory lower than 950MHz (1100-150=950). A better option for CGMiner is the "--gpu-memdiff -150" option.

MSI AB can use unofficial methods to force the clocks lower, all the way down as loooow as you can go. I ran mine at 275, 375, and 410, depending on the day.

It seems cards on PCIe 1x connection can't go below 625 in memory clock, or it's just me?
I can adjust the memory clock to as low as 150 on a card in regular 16x slot with multiple restart of MSI AB, but not the case for a card in 1x to 16x riser slot.

Hmm never heard of that. The PCIe bandwidth shouldn't affect anything having to do with the underclocking.

This is a very nice tutorial indeed. MSI-A really needs some whipping in a form of deleting profiles and couple of restart to get the slider down from 685, but after that it seems to do a good job.

My 7990 and 7970 are now doing 650Mh @ 1090/150 with stock volts. Temps went down around 5C and fan noise more than halved. I have to plug this computer to KillAWatt to see how effecient this became. Feels really good now.

What are the measurable benifits of UCing RAM?

My testing on nvidia cards (fml hurry up and arrive 7950s!) is it made zero different to temps (so potentially heat output so potentially power draw) with steady state conditions and fixed cooling.

Does anyone have any data?

Or does it just allow higher core speeds?

Okey, I took few measurements. One of my box systems: P7P55D, 875K, 2TB HDD, 8GB RAM, AX1200 PSU, 2x7970, 5 fans
1100/1375 ~660Mh/card, system power 590W total
1100/150 ~660Mh/card, system power 524W total

Savings from lowering GPURAM alone, 33W per card. Temps went down nicely too and that allows fans to spin slower so they might last longer.
Next I'm trying to measure other system with 7990 and 7970, we'll see if thats more power efficient.

I changed the .cfg to what it says in the instruction, but when I open afterburner the volt setting is still greyed out.

There's a "enable low level hardware acces interface" option with a drop down box with "kernel" and "user" option, is that what you mean in step 5 ?

Can someone re-upload the dll file? its remove from all the mirrors

Hello,
I would realy use the dll file.
Thank you.

Give me a pop up free, hardware acceleration free hosting site and I'll upload them.

Has anyone found a place to host these?  I would love to get my hands on the files.

I've got two Sapphire 7950's, neither using risers. Right now one is in a 16x slot and one in a 4x. I cannot get AB to take either of them below 625.

Update: Scratch that. Found instructions earlier in the thread to delete the contents of the Profiles folder in the AB folder. That did the trick, I can now clock lower than 625.

@nwoolls thanks for the tip, i have delete the content of profile folder and now i can downclock my mem at 310Mhz on my HD7950.

its a good thread except for one major thing...the dll site tries to install adware on your machine.  that is a really bad thing.

http://www.mediafire.com/?hlulrwjbk72ldly (http://www.mediafire.com/?hlulrwjbk72ldly)


should allow you to download the zip without installing adware.  no promises though as I will not monitor the link constantly.


update:   dude....GENIUS!!


thank you for the tip!

I've lowered temps on my 7990 malta from 79-86 range to 71-73C....hell yeah!!!!!

gpus 925-1000mhz, ram on all cards is now at 300mhz...this drastically reduced my heat...i am running stock cooling too...will post pics soon.

I do that and it work 7950 lowered to 155, but after restart my rig i always have all settings restarted to default(if i put 150,155,300,400) alway back to 1250.

What I do wrong?

If I adjust 625(is what AB left me adjust normally) work ok.

Same here. It's not just you. I then have to delete the contents of the Profiles folder and do it all again.

Yep MSI AB likes to recreate those profile files every time you restart your rig. Just delete the files again, and you'll be all set.

i put it at www.nogleg.com/archive/bitcoin.misc   as atiocdll.rar

i assume the DLL files are legit, i didn't use them myself (just ran through a couple virus scanners)

Very good news!!! After 48h without sleep, have memory working at 150 on my 7950 Vaporx's rig with auto starting with system will work for any 7xxx card!!! Now I go sleep but when i wake up i will release some some files and will write tutorial. I will be hard part of it due to my english.
I some one want to give me some motivation here is my BTC adress 19tohyQ7WjRD6n47HxyoPAiPGtsddYszgU

-1. If I can't ask for bitcoin tips for information to get GPU rigs to run better, then neither can you.

What file is that ?

The file that gets placed in the Afterburner folder is called, atipdlxx.dll.

edit..

+1 ssateneth ;D

Here is my tutorial  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209175.0

630MH/s. 12.8, but with the 12.10 OCL runtime.

It was the file that someone else put up on mediafire for some reason.  I assumed it was the dll being discussed

just stumbled upon this thread and saw something about dll file and hosting and then someone posting some DLL files and saying something about how his stuff works.  so i downloaded said DLL files, checked for viruses, and posted em

so since they're apparently unrelated, i'll remove them

*scratch*

ed: err, yeah, the atipdlxx.dll file is in there.  the 64 is for 64 bit systems?  shrug.  guess i'll leave it

I know this is an old thread, but does anyone have a better link for the DLL file required in the OP's first post. I believe it is atipdlxx.dll

When I used the link, all I get is a lot of spam windows from iLivid and Flash Video Downloader and crap.

How about we setup a Btc tech support room with Paltalk ?

Very easy to share files.. thats if they have worked out the glitches lol..

http://www.paltalk.com/

I don't have the time to do it myself but will stop in and do what/when I can..

I didn't need the DLL at all. Just follow the rest of the instructions as far as editing the CFG file and deleting the Profiles folder contents. Note that it will reset when you reboot the system. There is a thread here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209175.0) that works for making things stick through a reboot.

the post right above yours?

or the mediafire one some bit above that?

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=359671 (http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=359671) has a link to the files.

I am using those files and can do 625MHz memory clock on one box and 310 on another.

Edit: The 310 is short lived and random for me. I have not found a fully reproducible method for getting MSI to glitch the 310.

well the new msi AB has the unoffical oc'in in the settings tab now...much easier to underclock mem now...but sometimes it doesn't work the best...oh well i'll take what i can get

Having a bit of trouble with Afterburner / Trixx - no matter what settings I pick in Afterburner, voltage control is grayed out, i can however underclock the memory, overclock the core and use all the other options.

Trixx allows me to set the voltage, but not to undervolt the memory (by more that 150 away from the core clock).

At the moment I'm stuck using both, they work just fine - I will overclock the core, underclock the memory from AB, then open Trixx - it opens with the memory undervolted already - then I set the voltage.

GPU-Z confirms it all functions correctly - my only problem is the inconvenience of having to use two pieces of software.

I have not instaled CCC, using 13.5 beta drivers, 2 x Sapphire 7950.