Hey guys, I've got a 7970M on my machine and I absolutely love this beast of a card. I have it installed in the last generation of Sager machines, which originally didn't support the 7970M, however Sager has provided an upgrade service with a different vBIOS so that these cards will run on our machines.

Anyway, everything is working normal except for the voltage when running 3d clocks. I know that reference voltage for this card is 1.05V, however my card runs at 1.00V. The reason that this is an issue for me is that I can only overclock the core to 935MHz, where other users with the 7970M on stock voltage can push their cores to 1050MHz and beyond. I have been able to overclock the memory to 1650MHz just fine, but the core just won't budge any further. Temperatures are not an issue, this card runs extremely cool, even during an overclock (max temps during gaming are generally 70C, FurMark burn-in test max out at 80C).

One additional piece of information is that even with the same vBIOS, other users are reporting that their voltages are at reference levels during 3d clocks. This doesn't make any sense to me. Also, my last card was a 6970M and it ran at reference voltage during 3d clocks (1.10V). Hopefully someone can shed some light into this and give me a hand on how to get my card to run at reference voltage during 3d clocks. Thanks in advance!

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Sager NP8170 | Core i7 2720QM | AMD 7970M 2GB GDDR5 | 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 | Intel 510 120GB SSD | 750GB 7200RPM HDD | Intel 6230 | 90% NTSC GAMUT AUO V4 1080P LED LCD | Blu-Ray

Different manufacturers have the option to change both the clocks and voltage of the GPUs from reference. You can manually edit the VBIOS and up the voltage to 1.1 but even with the extra 5 hundredths of a volt I highly doubt you will get another 115mhz out of it.

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Crosshair IV Formula, Phenom II x4 965 w/ Corsair H60, 8 GiB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600, XFX HD 7970 Ghz, 512GB Vertex 4, 256GB Vector, 240GB Agility 3, Creative X-Fi Titanium w/ Creative Gigaworks S750, SeaSonic X750, HP ZR2440w, Win 7 Ultimate x64

True, looks like I just didn't get as lucky as some people out there who can break the 1000MHz barrier and beyond with stock voltage.

I've got someone willing to modify a vBIOS for me and change the voltage there, I'm just unsure if that will do anything at this point. My card is manufactured by Clevo, and other users with Clevo cards with the vBIOS I dumped for them report reference clocks and not the 1.00V that I am getting. Even if I can't change this and boost the OC too much, I'm just looking at this from a knowledge standpoint now.

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Sager NP8170 | Core i7 2720QM | AMD 7970M 2GB GDDR5 | 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 | Intel 510 120GB SSD | 750GB 7200RPM HDD | Intel 6230 | 90% NTSC GAMUT AUO V4 1080P LED LCD | Blu-Ray

You do have to be careful doing it in a laptop since unlike a failed desktop VBIOS failure you can't stick in another card and fix it

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Crosshair IV Formula, Phenom II x4 965 w/ Corsair H60, 8 GiB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600, XFX HD 7970 Ghz, 512GB Vertex 4, 256GB Vector, 240GB Agility 3, Creative X-Fi Titanium w/ Creative Gigaworks S750, SeaSonic X750, HP ZR2440w, Win 7 Ultimate x64

Fortunately I still have my 6970M I can put back in, in case of any issues.

This whole voltage thing just looks like an oddity that will never be explained unfortunately.

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Sager NP8170 | Core i7 2720QM | AMD 7970M 2GB GDDR5 | 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 | Intel 510 120GB SSD | 750GB 7200RPM HDD | Intel 6230 | 90% NTSC GAMUT AUO V4 1080P LED LCD | Blu-Ray