I recently built myself my first system and put in a HIS Radeon HD 7970 and so far I'm super happy with the card. I do however have a few questions so that I can get the most out of it.
I've been using Catalyst graphics overdrive to overclock the clock speed to 1100-1125 MHz but have always manually set the fan speed to 100% out of fear of it heating up too much. Although I use headphones, it does sound a bit like a tiny jet engine is living in my computer. My first question is, is it safe to leave the fan setting on anything but 100% or even manual? Second, what kind of performance increase would I see by increasing my memory clock speed to 1575 MHz from 1300? I am playing games like skyrim, the witcher 2, total war II, Bioshock infinite and my monitor is 1920x1080 at 60Hz.
Lastly in the last hour or so, its been making a quiet screeching noise intermintantly. It is not underload, and it will maket the noise for 2-3 seconds every 30 seconds. It doesn't get any louder when I manually increase the fan speed. What could be the source of this problem?
Get something like MSI afterburner 1st off. The noise you're hearing is probably voltage whine. Also try diff fan setting's and see if after a certain % you don't get anymore gains in cooling perfomance. As for overclocking start 1st with the Core clock instead of the memory clock thats where you will see most if not all of your FPS gains. Also recommend getting HWInfo64 to keep tabs on your vrm temps. I personally don't let mine get higher then 75C.
No when it crashes that's when you either wanna up the volt and if it keeps crashing then lower the clock speed again. Go in increments of like 10-15 mhz at a time. Also the coil whine may stop after a while of breaking in the card i know mine doesnt whine anymore. Not sure if all cards work like that tho.
I suggest you try out EVGA Precision X, or Asus GPU Tweak (or anything similar) because they allow you to set a fan curve. I personally like having the ability to set up a fan curve. That way, depending on the temp/load, my fans speed up or slow down accordingly. It would help you from running at 100% fan speed all the time and help with the jet engine noise.
Unfortunately I can't be of much help with the coil whine. Good luck!
That cooler will run fine with auto fan speed settings, and ive found Sapphires TRIXX to work well, but HIS has there own overclocking utility called iTurbo, use that as you shouldnt have a single probelms with it, and set your fan speeds accordingly.
Also for a 7970asa rule of thumb
Dont let the core go over 85c or the VRM go over 100c (these temps are still within the safe limits)