If you can easily afford to replace your videocard should it die right now, and you've really got a hard on for solving this, than an option would be looking into Radeon BIOS Editor (search these forums) and attempting to mod your BIOS to the desired speeds/voltages behaviour you want. If you can't afford to replace your videocard should it die right now, be happy with your 150/300 ~ 200/300 setup and leave it alone. Perhaps a better question to gauge the situation would be this: If your videocard spontaneously blew up right now, would it be easy or a hassle to replace it? Whether measured in money or time/stress, that answer will dictate whether you should do anything at all. I have no hard data, but unless you're paying for your electricity per second, I assure you the cost savings you'd gain going from 1.088v to 0.950v and the videocard fan going from X RPMs to Y RPMs will be negligible.Īlso I have no idea what thrice of a typical US electricity bill would be because I'm Canadian. So my hard truth idea is to suggest you re-evaluate whether what you have is actually a "problem." I know you're shooting for maximum power savings or whatever, but you're not going to lose your shirt over the electric bill when going from 0.950v to 1.088v. I could further speculate why its so sticky to 1.088v but it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't fix your problem. Its not like TriXX can reinvent hard-coded PowerPlay BIOS rules nor was it designed with that intention. TriXX is great for what it was designed to do, which is push envelopes, but not 100% solid when dealing with all of the special cases and profile backflips people would like it to do, and running 157/300 idle, 200/300 loaded is definitely a special case.
Using Sapphire 5850 cards myself I can confirm I know what you're talking about with the voltages being "sticky" to 1.088v but I cannot tell you if its a Sapphire issue or not, nor even if it's an issue with the voltage regulators Sapphire 5800 Series cards use. I tried the TriXX versions 4 (actually says 3.0.7 in the program) and 3.0.6. Pressing "reset" in TriXX does not fix this. When I go back to idling again the clocks will go down to 157/300 correctly, but the Voltage will stay at 1.088 V and will not return to 0.950 V unless I activate and deactivate Overdrive once. Once I apply the settings, the card clocks will go to 200/300 as expected, but the voltage will go to 1.088 V and I can't get it to stay low. The slider stays on the left position and cannot be moved. The problem I'm facing is that I cannot control the voltage.
(The catalyst changelogs said this should've been fixed months ago). And unlike Overdrive I can go pretty low (200/300) and additionally it goes down to idle clocks if not used, which still doesn't work correctly for me with Overdrive despite having the newest drivers. I'm using a Sapphire 5850 card and actually want to limit my clocks.