Gigabyte 570 8 or 4 phase vrm?

[mike1123]

i have had a gigabyte windforce x3 gtx 570 rev. 2.0 for about 2 months now. i have been messing around with overclocking for a while and i have had the core set to 825 at stock voltage for about 3 weeks without any issue, the factory overclock is 780. recently i was looking around online to see what voltages would be safe for me to do get a higher overclock without killing my card, and i found that a lot of 570's have died from upping the voltage even just a little bit. people say it's because the earlier 570's use a 4 phase vrm, but i've read that some of the newer or more advanced 570's, like the palit sonic platinum, have a 5 phase or even 8 phase vrm. i have looked everywhere and i can't find anything that say's if my card has the 4, 5 or 8 phase vrm. If anyone that knows the answer to this or how i can find the answer i would appreciate it as i would like to overclock for battlefield 3, but don't want to fry my over $300 card to do it.
thanks

 

[Rustyy117]

Pushed my GTX570 Beast Edition to hard and look what happened

That card was overvolted to 1.1V for about 6 months, but I modded the BIOS to allow more voltage, 2 runs of 3dmark11 @ 1.188V killed it, this card was watercooled and never reached more than 52C... This is a 4 phase power design.

Be carefull

 

[mike1123]

that's exactly what i've read about, it wasn't gpu heat issues that killed the cards it was the power phases. that sucks man, 570's are expensive enough and yours was also water cooled which i'm sure isn't cheap. but that's what i'm trying to avoid with mine, is there any way i can look on the card itself to see how many power phases i have? i have no idea what they look like or even what they do really...

 

[Rustyy117]

In my image I posted the 4 chips named 121F1022 are the VRM's I believe.

You could take the cooler off your card and look for yourself, although this will void your warranty. Try searching google for your cards VRM/phase design.

My card cost me £340 + £90 waterblock

 

[mike1123]

i've tried and can't find much of anything, some people say it's reference and some say it's not, but honestly after seeing what happened to yours i don't really want to even touch my voltage anymore. it makes you wonder why nvidia made the card that way to begin with.

 

[Rustyy117]

Yeah well mine has the worst power phase design and was happy at 1.1V so I'd say to be on the safe side stay below 1.088V 24/7.

Or perhaps just see how far you can push it on stock voltage.

Would have been nice if these cards had better power delivery but nVidia just want them to run at stock, they only loose money by increasing the number of VRM's/

 

[mike1123]

the max i can get on stock is 825, after that i get driver crashes. i might try to up the voltage a little in the future for a higher overclock but for right now i'm pretty happy with the performance. do you know if raising the voltage voids the warranty? i use msi afterburner to overclock but i dont know if the manufacturer can tell or not

 

[Rustyy117]

They won't be able to tell unless you change the BIOS and the card is still working enough to boot.

Just overclocking in MSI AB is fine, no-one would be able to tell.

 

[mike1123]

okay cool. thanks for all the help man, i appreciate it

 

[srafig4]

it's 12 VRM on it(GTX 570 SOC),you can look back pcb have LEDs on time display the VRM useage~

 

[mike1123]

i ccontacted gigabyte and asked them about it and they replied that i have 4 vrms for the gpu and 1 for the memory, so 5, and it has a designated heat sink for the vrm's. but I don't have the SOC version, i have the regular OC. I thought i would save some money and get the cheaper model since they looked like they had the same cooler just a little higher overclock on the SOC. if they really have 12 vrm, that was a bad choice

 

[mike1123]

Best answer selected by mike1123.