PC Graphics

[Kosiiq]

I have a radeon RX 6800 non XT

It is a MERC 319 from XFX and the thing is amazing!

I can overclock the living daylights out of it, and make the top 100 RX 6800 GPUs on Timespy with only air cooling.

I run the sliders maxxed out at 2600MHz with voltage set at 950mV (in HWinfo it displays a max voltage at 986mV)

In most games at 1080p I run way below the power limit of 250WTGP, but unfortunately, while my GPU has massive possibility to overclock even higher, AMD had limited clocks to 2.6GHZ max.  I could understand that AMD does not want the RX 6800 to outperform a stock RX 6800 XT, but, now that the RX 6800 is no longer in production, why not give us more headroom?  The thing is a unicorn anyway, with few people actually owning one, me, being lucky enough to aquire one in DEc 2020.

Please, AMD, consider us this favour, and increase the clock headroom, or, even better, remove the hard BIOS limit that resets the card to 500MHz when unexpected clock are dailed in with MorePowerTool.

This is all I ask and it would be amazing to see how far I can push this platinum sample of a GPU.

[Kosiiq]

Hmm...  I wonder if anyone has any update on AMD's future plans with this?

[Kosiiq]

I'm guessing the good folks at AMD are not really interested in this, since the RX6800 is such a unicorn.

Unfortunate, such a waste of silicon artificially held back by clock blocks 

[Nezkoot]

Ye seems the 6800 performs a bit beyond what was intended, on mine the difference between stock and hard OC is ~10fps in raytraced titles and up to 20 fps in non-rt, pretty much putting it at if not a bit (1-2 fps) above a stock 6800xt lmao (baselined on CP 1.5 benchmark test compared with friends XT variant) - all that with good temps at just 68-70c junction at 100% load / 50% fans with ~2590 mhz core and ~2050 vram @ 985mV (monitored during gameplay) HEH.

The only games where the OC alone cant outpace the XT are vram bandwidth abusing ones, like MSFS but even then the difference is nothing of worth. Otherwise yeah it's pretty much a 6800XT but with way better thermals (mate gets up to 100c junction temps oof).

Now if only the latest radeon drivers weren't absolutely unusable with or without OC that would be nice.

[Kosiiq]

Nice work!  Yeah man, I believe the RX 6800 was a stopgap card to rival the 3070, till the RX 6700XT was released.  Even now, with GPU availability going up, they are still nowhere to be found. At some point in the future I am hoping some AMD engineer reads this, and has compassion on us and starts the pipeline in getting an unlocked BIOS released.   One can only hope and dream...

[BreadPitch]

Hey, you do know there is MPT / More Power Tool out there to achieve this? Tell me what OC you can do with this!

RED BIOS EDITOR and MorePowerTool for Polaris, Navi and Big Navi - MPT 1.3.18 | igor'sLAB (igorslab.... 

Update: just learned that PowerLimit of max 250W is "hardcoded" in BIOS, even with MPT it does not go beyond that. So more than 2600MHz hardly achievable. So I support your request:

pls AMD provide us geeks with a decent BIOS to leverage the full potential of this wonderful card, now that your new generation of hardware is out anyway. 

[Kosiiq]

Hey!

Fortunately its not hardcoded into the BIOS.

I am able to get up to 275W on mine, but it failsafes after about 5min in Furmark, so I've abandoned the idea of pushing powerlimits outside of benches.  However, in MPT, you can adjust FCLK and SOC frequencies.

I've found increasing the SOC clock to 1800MHz as the sweet spot for best performance.  Also FCLK should be pushed as high as it can go in steps of 100MHz.

[BreadPitch]

Interesting! You are able to get 275W just with MPT, based on the original BIOS you imported?
But not more than 1025mV, right?

What model of 6800 do you have? Thanks! 

[Kosiiq]

Yes, I have an XFX MERC 319.

I believe its BIOS is available on Techpowerup's BIOS collection.  That said, I have the original BIOS from Nov 2020.

The 275W power limit works for about 5 min in Furmark, then goes into a limp mode, supplying only to a max of 150W until restart.  Probably a safety feature implemented by XFX.  My VRMs are not too hot, so something else triggers the limp.  I can use the 275W limit for running benchmarks, but I never game with it, since most games stay well below the 250W TGP even at 4K.

[M1987]

I'm using MPT and I'm confused by what to enter the FCLK values as.By default it's at 500/1500 min/max,and a poster on another forum posted some settings to try(1940/1940) and when I tried a benchmark,the fans on the GPU started going mad,and I had to turn it off by the plug.Do I leave the min at 500,and go up in 100mhz on the max? and what about memory at last level? that's at 1400,do I raise that too? 

[Kosiiq]

Sorry, I have not replied to you as yet.

MY GPU cannot accept such a high FCLK.

here are my setting that work.

Note: I run 1660/1880 for bench Overclocks.

You will find me on 3dMark top 100 on all benches with RX6800 as GPU filter

The below image is my day2day OC, I'm also running SOC overclock as that boosts performance and encoding performance for OBS to stream and record in different formats.

[BreadPitch]

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[M1987]

I have the XFX RX 6800,but the QICK version,and it's a beast of a card after overclocking it,but the AMD app crashes a few minutes after i set the max frequency to 2600MHz,and resets back to stock settings. Does it mean it's unstable? if I set it to 2500NHz I get no crashes at all 

[Kosiiq]

It may be due to instability.

Your 2.6GHz OC is unstable yes.

First try setting max clock to 2595MHz and min clock to 2495MHz and see if that works.

If it still crashes work your way down 5 MHz until you get stable OC

A good option is to test with demanding software such as 3D Mark Timespy.  If your OC runs stable without crashes after a few runs, you will probably be fine.