xian65

Not sure if it's still relevant to you but I have a similar setup. 2 x eVGA Gtx 780's in SLI under water along with my 3930k CPU. I'm running the modified vBIOS that Svl7 created for these cards that allows for 1.212V, boost disabled along with a crazy high power limit and the max I can push my cards to is 1163Mhz on the core. Extended periods of looping Heaven benchmark see no higher temps than 46 degrees C with ambient around 28 degrees C. Running a Silverstone Strider 1500W PSU along with the extra power connector in my Rampage IV Formula board so I know that power is not an issue. Using the Afterburner soft mod to get voltage up as high as 1.28V see's me running significantly higher frequencies around 1280Mhz but eventually the VRM's get way too hot and the driver stops responding. The mod also stops the normal voltage drop down in 2d mode so it's really not healthy for the cards. I would say that it is due to the quality of the original GK110 chips used in the 780 as compared to the B revision in the 780Ti which seem to be clocking higher and have a better designed OEM VRM circuit. It's still odd that you are only seeing 1.149V when stock you should be able to hit 1.2V I believe. If you are testing using Kombustor or any other sort of "Power virus" as nvidia or AMD would call them then the driver may be restricting max voltage. Better off trying it in a game with benchmark like Tomb Raider and ensure V-Sync is off.

I had a similar issue on my machine which is the same spec as yours. Went into the BIOS and for some reason the core voltage was set at a max of 1.2v which was causing the CPU fan to ramp up and down constantly and driving me mad. I dropped the max voltage down to 1.05V and dropped the max multiplier on all 4 cores to 35.

I'm looking to upgrade the Blu-Ray drive of my AW17 R5 to a writer as well. What is the model number of the drive you installed to be compatible with the slot loading bay ? RAID 0 for SSD's require Intel RST driver version 11.7 or above to use TRIM and ensure that the drives stay in a consistent performance state as well. The EVO 1TB drives are plenty fast on their own and having them in RAID0 just makes it all the more complex to restore the data should one drive die. Only way I would go with that setup is if I bought 1 x 2.5" EVO 1TB and paired it with an mSATA version of the same drive, put them in RAID0 for system and then had an additional mechanical drive as a backup drive. A 2TB RAID 0 SSD system drive is pretty awesome though

Only thing vBIOS will allow is for more voltage to be applied which may stabilise the overclock but at that frequency it seems more likely that heat is your problem. What sort of temperatures are you seeing when using something like HWINFO or MSI afterburner ? I have a Logitech keyboard with LCD screen attached to my AW17 and use MSI Afterburner to output the temps to the KB LCD and with stock vBIOS and a 100Mhz overclock I see a temp range of around the 80 to 83 degree celsius mark.

Ok, further research has shown that it is definitely compatible with the 780M in the AW17 and does require an INF mod. Still not 100% sure on if it supports the 3D panel variant and if the 3D capabilities are retained. Would giving SVL7 a donation to mod the exitsting BIOS of my card solve any of these issues ?

Nvidia GTX 880m review This is the review that T | I did using an MXM compatible machine for testing. Seems the throttling issues still exist using stock vBIOS

Hi Guys, I've spent countless hours reading this site looking for overclocking methods for my desktop 780's and now 780M in my Alienware 17 and I can't believe how much incredible info is on this site and so finally decided to sign up. My question is about the modified vBIOS that svl7 posted for the 780M. The post is now up to a few hundred pages and after a few hours of reading I still couldn't find my answer. I would like to know if the 780M vBIOS works with the 120hz 3D panel variant of the Alienware 17 and if it then requires any driver .inf modifications while still retaining the 3D capabilities ?

I'd also be curious to know if anyone has managed to just drop an 880M into the AW 17 R5 chasis without issue. Realistically it's the same exact same GPU just with memory modules that are twice the density (total 8GB rather than 4). Since the R5 will come out with the 880M there shouldn't be any BIOS issues. Most samples show that they are just specially selected GK104 chips able to run at the stock core frequency of ~950Mhz. I saw a graph showing that the 880M has a lower TDP than the 780M but I find that hard to believe when they both run at the same voltage. Wouldn't surprise me if a modified vBIOS was needed to work out the kinks like the 780M

Just going back to what people were saying about coil whine, I have 2 x evga 780's that came with the reference cooler which I have mounted EK waterblocks to and I get some pretty loud coil whine with the stock 80.10.36.00.80 BIOS so I doubt anything in the BIOS will fix that.