Not utilizing/seeing full 3gb for Radeon 7970?

[woofman_83]

I just received my Cyberpowerpc build a few days ago an wasn't as impressed with the hardware step up I was expecting.

Quick rundown:
Gigabyte Z77x-UP5
I5-3570K with free 10% overclock(3.8ghz atm)
256gb OCZ Agility 4 SSD
16gb 1866 Gskill RAM
HIS ICQ x2 AMD Radeon 7970 3GB
Running 1900x1200 24 inch old Acer monitor

Updated drivers

First thing after that, open up Battlefield 3, crank up the settings to Ultra and........hmm, 65fps that was dipping down to 40...on a small map! Not exactly what I was expecting after going on reviews from others of "1 7970 can handle any game currently out at 1900x1200."

3DMark11
ScoreP7764 with AMD Radeon HD 7970(1x) and Intel Core i5-3570K Processor

Graphics Score7990

Physics Score7254

Combined Score

...and then they noted that my system should be scoring in the mid 9000 range.

I noticed that it had my graphics card listed as a "7970 with 1024mb or ram"

Opened up CPU-ID, it has it listed as "AMD Radeon Series 7900" with 1024mb of memory, but everything else is blank (memory type, bus width, everything under clocks).

Did I receive a defective video card or was it just not setup properly? Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Witcher79]

Try clocking it up the Bios or in your AMD control catalyst.

 

[ericlw]

why is 40fps considered low?

 

[trapper]

As Witcher said check the CCC settings.

As for CPUID thats normal. Mine is the same (same card even). But it shows up in CCC as 3gb and in games I'm using well over 1gb of memory.

As for BF3, is that online? Thats normal for online.

 

[hwangchan]

sounds like the Vid card is defective, its only registering 1G of its RAM, which means the RAM is likely defective, or they packaged the wrong card in the box by mistake.

Id warranty it.

 

[paulemannsen]

why is 40fps considered low?

why is 20 km/h slow?

 

[woofman_83]

40fps is slow because my previous system of an i7 920 and a radeon 5870 ran from 30-40 fps on the same maps (and yes, multiplayer).

I clocked it up and increased the score in 3dMark11 a small amount, still didn't break 8000. Is the page at the end in 3dmark just advertising? It expected that card to score 9000+ which is quite a large increase.

Are these grounds for an RMA or do I actually need to have some form of proof that it's not operating "as other 7870s do". I'm just trying to make sure I got what I paid for...I had an issue with a previous cyberpowerpc with bad RAM and it took quite a run around to have them send me 3 new sticks. Just hoping it doesn't happen again.

 

[trapper]

What did you increase the clock speeds to?

 

[woofman_83]

1055/1500

 

[Derza10]

40fps is slow because my previous system of an i7 920 and a radeon 5870 ran from 30-40 fps on the same maps (and yes, multiplayer).

I clocked it up and increased the score in 3dMark11 a small amount, still didn't break 8000. Is the page at the end in 3dmark just advertising? It expected that card to score 9000+ which is quite a large increase.

Are these grounds for an RMA or do I actually need to have some form of proof that it's not operating "as other 7870s do". I'm just trying to make sure I got what I paid for...I had an issue with a previous cyberpowerpc with bad RAM and it took quite a run around to have them send me 3 new sticks. Just hoping it doesn't happen again.

Wait is it a 7970 or 7870?? you have said both... If it is 7870 those 3dmark11 scores should be about right... if it was a 7970 it should be around 10k+... I score 11770 with my GTX 680.

 

[helz IT]

Well, I doubt your older computer was running everything at "Ultra" and getting the same framerates. Chances are you can manually tweak a few graphic settings and drastically improve your performance for a very slight hit in visual quality.

That being said, Battlefield 3 is known for being CPU limited in multiplayer, and you'd be better off benchmarking a singleplayer game if you're trying to determine whether your graphics card has issues.

Run gpuz in a log as you play, it will tell you exactly how much vram your card is using. If it never goes above 1gb, then the next step is reinstalling your video drivers.

edit: ^^oh yeah, 7970 or 7870? That's a big discrepancy.

 

[hwangchan]

Are these grounds for an RMA or do I actually need to have some form of proof that it's not operating "as other 7870s do". I'm just trying to make sure I got what I paid for...I had an issue with a previous cyberpowerpc with bad RAM and it took quite a run around to have them send me 3 new sticks. Just hoping it doesn't happen again.

Try running DxDiag from cmd window, and read the Approx Total Memory from the Display 1 tab. This should be the ram of the vid card, which from what I see the 7970 only comes in a 3Gb version, so its unlikely to be false advertising / cheaper component used. If it is as low as you have stated, the video card should get an RMA.

Also, can anyone else confirm the displayed memory of a 7970 this way (or in the aforementioned cpu-ID) to prove its not a chipset / driver error?

 

[woofman_83]

It is a 7970.
My last card was running a mix of high and medium at 1900x1200.

Well apparently my system id monitor or something of the like was outdated for 3dMark11, updated that and now it's registering the full 3gb on that final page.

What's interesting is that it now reports my 3950k running:

ProcessorIntel Core i5-3570K Processor
Processor clock 1,601 MHz
Physical / logical processors 1 / 4
# of cores4
PackageLGA 1155
Manufacturing process
22 nm
TDP 77 W

and my RAM:

Memory 16,384 MB
Module 1 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz
Module 2 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz
Module 3 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz
Module 4 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz

The numbers are starting to get closer to the average for my specs, I can't imagine too many people running 3dMark on non-OC'd systems so I'll just start here and work my way up

Thanks for the advise, I'll go run some gpuz for a few rounds and see how it fairs.

 

[Derza10]

It is a 7970.
My last card was running a mix of high and medium at 1900x1200.

Well apparently my system id monitor or something of the like was outdated for 3dMark11, updated that and now it's registering the full 3gb on that final page.

What's interesting is that it now reports my 3950k running:

ProcessorIntel Core i5-3570K Processor
Processor clock 1,601 MHz
Physical / logical processors 1 / 4
# of cores4
PackageLGA 1155
Manufacturing process
22 nm
TDP 77 W

and my RAM:

Memory 16,384 MB
Module 1 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz
Module 2 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz
Module 3 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz
Module 4 4,096 MB G.Skill DDR3 @ 800 MHz

The numbers are starting to get closer to the average for my specs, I can't imagine too many people running 3dMark on non-OC'd systems so I'll just start here and work my way up

Thanks for the advise, I'll go run some gpuz for a few rounds and see how it fairs.

AHHH you mislabeling your components is killing me lol where did you come up with 3950k?!?!

 

[woofman_83]

DxDiag

ATI Radeon 7900 series:

Total Approx Memory: 10955mb

Is that utilizing unused system RAM? why on earth is it so high?


edit: also, CPU-Z has all of my ram listed at 800mhz...did those morons downclock it when they installed it?

 

[hwangchan]

I think that might be a bug of dxdiag with your CPU, which has integrated graphics.. the integrated graphics will use a portion of your total system ram which would explain the 10G...

odd though, id never seen that..

 

[Kari]

the total memory in dxdiag is always messed up since it somehow includes shared system ram as well, and since windows allocates it on the fly and only when needed that value has really no meaning at all...

what does GPU-Z report?

also about the ram speed, it is determined by the memory multiplier and the baseclock and I find it unlikely that there would be a multiplier available that would let it run at the 933MHz speed as advertised... (I'm still on 1st gen core i5 so I dont remember what multipliers are available on that cpu, you could check them in bios..)

 

[woofman_83]

the total memory in dxdiag is always messed up since it somehow includes shared system ram as well, and since windows allocates it on the fly and only when needed that value has really no meaning at all...

what does GPU-Z report?

also about the ram speed, it is determined by the memory multiplier and the baseclock and I find it unlikely that there would be a multiplier available that would let it run at the 933MHz speed as advertised... (I'm still on 1st gen core i5 so I dont remember what multipliers are available on that cpu, you could check them in bios..)

Well GPU-z just ran for about 45 minutes of BF3, the max Memory Usage (Dedicated) was 0mb and the max for Memory Usage (Dynamic) was 1257mb.

I find it a little odd that it didn't go above that, however, GPU-z main page is reporting all the correct numbers for the snapshot (3gb ram, 1055/1500)

Could it actually be some bad vRAM?

 

[helz IT]

It's probably fine. I've only had my 7970 for a few weeks, but I've yet to see anything go much beyond 2gb (Skyrim with a ton of texture enhancements).

 

[Kari]

GPU-z main page is reporting all the correct numbers for the snapshot (3gb ram, 1055/1500)

Could it actually be some bad vRAM?

sounds fine to me, bad vram should give you all sorts of texture corruption and artefacting...
though I'm not sure but at least on the hd5000 series amd introduced a memory read error correction method that just repeated the read/write operation if it detected an error, this lead to lower over all performance when you overclocked the ram too high so it wasn't stable anymore. It didnt cause any artefacting at first anyways if the re-read went error free, of course if you really over did it so much so that the error correction method couldnt fix it then you would get artefacting etc... but I dont know if it is still like that on the hd7000 series.