Overclocking a sapphire 5850 not as easy as a Gigabyte 5850

[sgravina]

Hello weird bitcoin world.  This is my first post.  I'm fairly skeptical about bitcoins but my daughter asked me to build her a miner and it looked like a fun way to squander my investment capital.  I built a 1.4 GHash/sec machine using 4 5850's.  You can see the first card of my miner here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7216.msg148614#msg148614

My first three cards were Gigabyte 5850s.  I'm running ubuntu.  I installed the aticonfig program following these directions: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7514.0

Using aticonfig I was able to set the clock to 920 MHz up from the default of 725 MHz.  That was quite a nice jump.

Now I have bought a used Sapphire 5850 boards.  Using the same procedure I can only set the clock to 725 MHz.

Can I get more speed out of my Sapphire board?

Related - Does downclocking the memory help?  If so how do I do it if it's not possible with aticonfig?

[d3c0n808]

More than likely this is a bios issue, you can either reflash the bios using rbe editor and windows or i believe you can also use another windows program to overclock on the fly, i went with the bios flash which really wasnt that hard, just time consuming to get the settings the way i wanted them.

[darvil]

I found I can actually push the sapphire more then gigabyte or xfx cards. IE I got 970 stable on my sapphires although this might get a bit too hot in your setup.

But I didn't use the aticonfig for that.  As the person above mentioned, I flashed the bios and didn't have to worry about that anymore.  Give that a go.  Its not hard at all.

By the way if you don't mind, can you tell me what you used to build that?  I'm assuming its cased? I've been trying to find a case to put 4 in and a board where I can lay the vid cards in a way I can put it in a case without much effort.

[sgravina]

I'm not done yet.  My first motherboard (ASUS P8P67 Pro) holds three cards.  My second motherboard (MSI 890FXA-GD70) will hold four cards but only has one now.  I'm still searching for three more cheapish cards.  When I'm done I'll have seven cards running.  Then I'm out of credit until my daughter pays me back with her bitcoin riches.

I'm not using a case.  That way I can use a bigger fan.  In fact I'm not using anything I don't need.  No disk drive, a usb stick instead, no CD drive, no monitor, I use a monitor to turn it on then I unplug it.

Sam