5830 Overclock w/ Pencil Mod

[jeeves]

I just got an HIS iCooler V 5830 off of newegg for $200 and was pretty upset when I found out it didn't have a voltage controller (I didn't know to look for a reference board). I spent a whole day flashing bioses and whatnot, but I found out that HIS probably didn't put a voltage controller. I found this pencil mod for the 5830 today and tried it and got some pretty awesome overclocks.

Core: 800 MHz stock @ 1.14V to 1025 MHz @ 1.27 V (measured w/ voltmeter)
Memory: 1000 MHz stock to 1325 MHz

Crysis benchmark highest temp: 62C in 22C room @ 100% fan

Running the crysis gpu benchmark at all full settings and with full AA at 1280x1024, i went from 30.32 to 36.69 FPS.

Conclusion: You can get about a 20% performance increase out of a 5830 if you feel like doing a pencil mod. I might try upping the voltage more tomorrow. I got up to 1.32V with the pencil mod, but it became abit unstable. Not sure if this is because of temps or what, because my core temp is fine. Maybe some other component is heating up.

Because the instructions in the post I linked to aren't clear, if anyone wants to try it, I thought I'd post instructions.

NOTE: These pictures are from Meaker's post I made a link to above.

If you lay your card with pcb facing up and pci-e female plugs facing you, the top left pci-e solder point is ground





1. Set your multimeter to kOhms scale.
2. Using the first picture (where it points to pencil mod) find the two pins it refers to in the second picture (the two in the box).
3. If you have your graphics card w/ pcb up on your desk with the female pci-e plugs facing you, place one contact of your voltmeter on the bottom solder point (the lower one of the two you found in step 2).
4. Place the other multimeter contact on the ground (top left pci-e power solder point)
5. You should get somewhere around 5 kOhms.
6. Lightly draw between the two solder points in step 2 with a pencil.
7. Blow off excess graphite
8. Measure resistance like you did in steps 3-4. Play with the amount of shading between the two points until you get to about .3 to .4 kOhms below your initial reading.
9. Plug your card back in.
10. Measure your core voltage while running something graphics intensive like crysis by placing one contact of your multimeter on ground and the other on the solder point in the first picture labeled VGPU measure.
11. You can slowly lower resistance to up the voltage.

Absolutely do not do this without a multimeter, because it's really easy to shade too much without knowing it and maybe overheat your card. I'm not responsible if something happens to your card if you try this.