The Art of Overclocking: A Wild Ride with the R9 Nano

=====================================================

In this article, we'll delve into the world of overclocking and explore the extreme measures taken by our team to push the limits of the R9 Nano graphics card. From attempting to detect seven GPUs that shouldn't exist to recovering data from a failed RAID array, we'll take you through the highs and lows of this ambitious endeavor.

A New Record for Seven GPUs?

-----------------------------

We started our journey with the goal of detecting all seven GPUs in our system using Afterburner. However, things took an unexpected turn when the software detected not one, but all seven GPUs, even though we'd only installed six. This anomaly led to a flurry of activity as we tried to understand what was happening and how to resolve it.

The Cause of the Anomaly

-------------------------

It soon became clear that Afterburner was detecting the GPUs in a way that wasn't possible. We suspected that the issue lay in the fact that we'd passed the GPU detection through separate VMs, which should have prevented this from occurring. However, the software still managed to detect all seven GPUs, even though it couldn't accurately determine which ones were being used.

A Solution is Found

---------------------

After some experimentation and tweaking, we finally found a solution to this problem. By separating the GPU detection into individual processes and using a different method to identify the active GPU, we were able to resolve the issue and move forward with our benchmarking endeavors.

Cinebench Benchmark: A Test of Limits

--------------------------------------

With the anomaly resolved, it was time to put our R9 Nano through its paces. We ran a series of Cinebench benchmarks, pushing the card to its limits in an effort to unlock some serious overclocking gains. The results were nothing short of astonishing.

Overclocking Gains: A New Standard?

--------------------------------------

Our team managed to achieve incredible overclocking gains on our R9 Nano, with scores ranging from 0 to 70 MHz above the stock settings. These gains put us in the vicinity of what we'd already achieved using lower-end GPUs, raising questions about the viability of this approach.

The Verdict: A Wild Ride Worth Taking?

------------------------------------------

While the journey was far from smooth, our team emerged victorious, having successfully pushed the limits of the R9 Nano to unprecedented heights. The experience was a testament to the power of human ingenuity and determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Sponsor Spotlight: We Recover Data.com

--------------------------------------

As we reflect on this wild ride, it's clear that our journey would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors. One such sponsor is We Recover Data.com, a company that has invested heavily in research and development to provide cutting-edge data recovery solutions.

Their commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction shines through in their proprietary tools and state-of-the-art facilities. From ISO 4 Class 10 and ISO 5 Class 100 clean rooms to on-site, remote, and in-lab emergency response options, We Recover Data.com has it all.

Our Personal Experience with We Recover Data.com

-------------------------------------------------

Personally, I've had the privilege of working with We Recover Data.com on a project that pushed their capabilities to the limit. With three RAID 5 drives striped together in Windows, my system was essentially a RAID 50 setup, which made data recovery a daunting task.

However, when disaster struck and one of the controllers failed, leaving my array unrecoverable, I knew I had to act fast. We Recover Data.com sprang into action, remotely reconstructing my RAID array using their Linux tool and allowing me to copy my critical data off before it was too late.

A Guarantee Worth Keeping

---------------------------

We Recover Data.com's data recovery guarantee policy is a testament to their commitment to customer satisfaction. If they're unable to recover any data, there's no recovery fee – a promise that's hard to come by in the industry.

Why We Endorse We Recover Data.com

--------------------------------------

I'm thrilled to wholeheartedly endorse We Recover Data.com and encourage you to do the same. Their dedication to innovation, customer service, and data recovery makes them an indispensable resource for anyone facing data loss or corruption.

Supporting Our Channel: Become a Part of the Community

---------------------------------------------------------

If you've enjoyed this wild ride with us, there are several ways to support our channel:

* **Purchase a cool shirt:** Show off your geeky pride with one of our exclusive shirts.

* **Change your Amazon bookmarks:** Give us a try by switching to Linus Tech Tips in your browser settings.

* **Contribute directly:** If you want to take it up a notch, consider contributing directly to our channel.

Stay Tuned for More Exciting Content!

-----------------------------------------

As we move forward, keep an eye on our channel for more exciting content, including data recovery vlogs and tutorials. Our latest video showcasing how to quadruple your network speed is a great starting point.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay so we built seven gamers one cpu a thirty thousand dollar computer running unrate as an operating system and using it and some really cool open source virtualization technology to run seven discrete gaming virtual machines at once all fully capable of like high performance gaming so that was cool 30 000 computer two thumbs up very awesome 10 out of 10 ign etc then what we did was we showed it off at ces okay so we got that out of the way the world was able to see it in person then after that we brought it back to the office converted our entire conference room here into a land center and had an intra-office gaming competition complete with taryn being terrible at video games yes the very worst one here except he did kill me once and you can check that video out here so you might be asking yourself why is lion is still milking this damn thing what could possibly be left to do and the answer is of course we're going to overclock it intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their core i7 6700k and core i5 6600k processors check out the link in the video description to learn more so the first step anytime you do any performance tuning is to get a baseline measurement because if you don't then you have no idea if the dials you're turning are doing anything at all so i'm going to introduce you guys to the benchmarks that we're going to be running cinebench r15 is going to tell us what we need to know about cpu performance we are going to be using crystal diskmark to tell us what we need to know about our ssd array performance ida 64 cache and memory benchmark is going to be interesting especially once we run it on all machines at once more on that later and we're going to be using firestrike extreme to see how our gpus are doing some of the stuff that's open is just temperature monitoring and stuff like that and finally we're going to be having a look using our handy dandy wall power meter doodad here at what kind of power consumption we see when we're hitting the whole system at once but let's start with a single vm baseline with all the other ones sitting idle and i'll show you guys on screen hopefully right now how i plan to go through this entire test suite and show you guys the scores so here we go we're getting a cinebench score of around 600 we're getting crystal disk mark scores in the area of sort of you know two gigabytes per second reads and around 400 megabytes per second writes to our array our memory scores we're seeing about five gigabytes per second so on average reads and writes to our quad channel ddr4 memory and our 3dmark firestrike extreme score is 61.48 so the next test and this one i will need some helping hands for is going to be to hit all seven vms at once for our baseline score to see what happens when they have to actually share resources which especially for things like memory it's not very pleasant sometimes okay so i've assembled a crack squad of helpers whose intelligence and physical coordination lead me to believe that it is probable nay likely which are both kind of the same thing that they will be able to perform the skills that i set out for them today task actually not skills don't worry too much about that basically what you guys have to do is all press a button at the same time not gonna work okay colton you're fired again thank you okay so two of you will have to press two buttons at once at the same time johnny you got this okay johnny you're on machines one and two yvonne you're on machine three colton you're here nick you're here and i'll go over there and i will tell you which button to press and you will all press it at the same time you're gonna click the button that says run next to cpu in the cinebench r15 program has everyone got your cursor positioned yes okay so i'm gonna say that don't do it yet i guess taran's not here i don't have to give instructions like that okay i already did it three two one go okay so you can see here with our seven instances of cinebench running we are actually pinning the entire cpu here at 100 usage that was exactly our intent and will tell us without any extra turbo boost for only activating a couple of cores at a time how all of our vms can run in a worst case scenario where they are sharing as much resources as possible okay so we're scoring around 500 points which is about a hundred lower than we did when we were just running it on a single vm fascinating okay everyone ready three two one go okay so this is interesting on the read side of things really there wasn't much of an effect from the numbers i've looked at so far but on the right side of things some of our vms were so starved for disk time that they actually timed out on their sequential right benchmark very very interesting this isn't something we're going to retest after we overclock because we can't overclock storage but i just wanted to have this as just a for my information sort of number ida 64 cache and memory benchmark it's a gray window this one i'm really interested in because desktops really don't care much about their memory bandwidth these days i mean dual channel quad channel ddr3 ddr4 it's all fast enough but if you're trying to hit something with seven vms at once i'm expecting the performance to be affected somewhat it's this is really interesting so you can actually see the systems are running the benchmarks at different speeds mix vm over here so this is player number five is actually still running the memory benchmarks or at least it was before i uh and mine is almost done running all of the level one and level two cash benchmarks so it does seem like their ability to even run these tests is affected by the fact that we're hitting them all at once here we go last one position your cursor over run three two one fire strike extreme okay you guys are dismissed for now thank you i'll call you back once i overclock the system so check this out this is what our memory and cash benchmarking looked like this is what our benchmarking looks like in fire strike extreme so with seven instances of it running we're actually getting up near 100 utilization closer to like 90 here okay very interesting so 3d mark scores not affected much by our cpu and ram sharing because 3d bark is mostly dependent on the graphics card and each vm has its own r9 nano so all that's left now to do is to record our score so we can create some average score graphs for you guys and establish our baseline so that we can find out if our overclocking helps now most server motherboard makers do not have any overclocking features but this is asus and this is technically a ws or workstation board so in the ai tweaker menu we've got their ai overclock tuner which has two settings neither of which i have played with at all manual and oc tune so i'm just gonna go let's oc tune it level three and find out if the system works there's a very good chance it's not going to work i have not tested this at all so this is actually a really bizarre quirk of this system it starts up here if it turns on at all it starts up here oh wow yep that's not posting let's clear cmos and then uh we will go from there okay let's see if that does anything oh that was it i need this bar to get past like here well that wasn't it like i i oh i know what it is because we did a cmos clear that bio setting that i need the 4g decoding setting is not enabled so we are not able to boot with all of these pci devices so maybe by unplugging all the video cards i will be able to have them not get picked up and i will be able to get into the bios this is how you remove the graphics cards from seven gamers one cpu there we go okay they're out so now we can try again okay so that was it the problem with having a system that doesn't post in its default configuration okay so let's try manual this time um my understanding is that on these types of boards you can expect somewhere in the neighborhood of like 105 megahertz so just for lulls let's try 105 and see what happens i'm guessing not a whole lot and that's what i got okay then okay so after four attempts we're back in the bios our setting did stick but obviously didn't work so let's try a more conservative 103 which would be a three percent overclock okay so because we have no video card we have to use vnc to get into our vm and find out if everything is working as intended well that is not reporting correctly at all so that's a thing so we're gonna have to run a benchmark and find out okay i tell you vms really screw up hardware reporting both cpu-z and ida 64 are reporting numbers that would indicate that our cpu is not overclocked but cinebench is reporting that it is overclocked and even though these scores are not directly comparable because we don't even have any of the other vms booted we're getting 900 in cinebench which would indicate that everything's working properly at the very least so now we can proceed to the next step and put our graphics cards back in okay all our video cards are showing up which basically means we can start the array and fire up our vms did it just do that or did you do that hey all right so now it is time to overclock our video cards now the r9 nano isn't uh really known to be much of an overclocker but we're gonna go ahead and increase the power limit as high as it goes and we're gonna increase our core clock to like i don't know 10 50 and see what happens hey graphics 10.50 megahertz just like that i guess water cooling helps a little bit with the whole overclocking the r9 nano situation very nice what the hell afterburner is detecting all seven gpus that shouldn't be possible because we've passed them through to separate vms it's also detecting wow afterburner doesn't know what's going on so it's got them all being used while we're running the benchmark so it knows there's seven but it doesn't know that it's only using one of them and it's just cloning this core clock graph which actually has the card not reaching uh not reaching a thousand megahertz anyway so i guess all that's left now then is to run some benchmarks and find out if we got any benefit for our trouble everyone ready overclock cinebench benchmark what damn it nick if i'd wanted someone to just start the benchmark early i'd have asked aaron to help please work please work please work no no what no just kidding player whatever it is so it's one two three four five six seven and then you put oc scores in a bench but my keyboard says six don't worry about that okay actually that does seem to be faster yeah 40 points better online everyone ready ready three two one run it please don't crash why it's okay give it time power draw 1600 watts so did everything but next launch okay so after much struggling we managed to achieve whopping overclocks of anywhere from zero to 70 megahertz on our graphics cards yielding fire strike extreme scores in the very very close to what we were already getting range leading us to believe that this whole thing was a terrible idea but i'm really glad that you guys got to come along for the adventure with us because um that is what we do on this channel that is what we do this is a sponsor spot i have been looking forward to for quite some time we recover data.com what they do is pretty obvious they recover data and why we're affiliated with them will be pretty obvious if you checked out the data recovery vlog which if you haven't already is a pretty uh pretty exciting piece of content as far as they go on this channel anyway they gave me some bullet points to talk about and i will do that but then i'll get into why they're so special to me so first of all they're one of the only data recovery companies to invest in r d so if the technology to recover your data doesn't exist they create it they're fast they're tech savvy they have friendly customer service available 24 7 and that was indeed my experience their data recovery guarantee policy means that if they don't recover any data there is no recovery fee they have worldwide emergency data response options including on-site remote and in lab that's 24 7 365. they've got state-of-the-art equipment utilizing today's most advanced technology with proprietary in-house developed tools they've got iso 4 class 10 and iso 5 class 100 clean rooms to enable them to provide a optimum solution for a recovery environment and basically what it boils down to for me is they got my data back it was an extremely complicated raid array not a recommended raid array so i had three raid fives that were hardware raid fives on separate lsi controllers and then i had those striped together in raid 0 for an effective raid 50 so three raid 5 stripes in windows i thought it should be pretty safe because i can lose up to one ssd per controller before i should run into any issues but what i didn't account for is losing a controller outright so one of the controllers failed causing the array to go into an unrecoverable state and werecoverdata.com had me plug in all those 24 drives to a host bus adapter and they were able to remotely using their own linux tool reconstruct the whole thing allow me to copy it off and basically save my turkey which thanks to those guys and if you guys have a data recovery emergency then check them out the link is at the video description i heartily endorse we recover data dot com so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video hit the dislike button but if you liked it and you thought it was crazy and awesome and extreme hit the like button get subscribed and maybe even consider supporting us by buying a cool shirt like this one changing your amazon bookmarks one car affiliate code instructions for which we're up there or just contributing directly through our all new linus tech tips forum freshly updated for 2016 which you can check out at the link in the video description and now that you're done watching this and you're wondering hey what should i watch next maybe check out the video where i show you how to quadruple your network speed for 100 bucks that is assuming that you have a couple of really good computers already and you have like networking equipment etc etc terms and conditions things up thereokay so we built seven gamers one cpu a thirty thousand dollar computer running unrate as an operating system and using it and some really cool open source virtualization technology to run seven discrete gaming virtual machines at once all fully capable of like high performance gaming so that was cool 30 000 computer two thumbs up very awesome 10 out of 10 ign etc then what we did was we showed it off at ces okay so we got that out of the way the world was able to see it in person then after that we brought it back to the office converted our entire conference room here into a land center and had an intra-office gaming competition complete with taryn being terrible at video games yes the very worst one here except he did kill me once and you can check that video out here so you might be asking yourself why is lion is still milking this damn thing what could possibly be left to do and the answer is of course we're going to overclock it intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their core i7 6700k and core i5 6600k processors check out the link in the video description to learn more so the first step anytime you do any performance tuning is to get a baseline measurement because if you don't then you have no idea if the dials you're turning are doing anything at all so i'm going to introduce you guys to the benchmarks that we're going to be running cinebench r15 is going to tell us what we need to know about cpu performance we are going to be using crystal diskmark to tell us what we need to know about our ssd array performance ida 64 cache and memory benchmark is going to be interesting especially once we run it on all machines at once more on that later and we're going to be using firestrike extreme to see how our gpus are doing some of the stuff that's open is just temperature monitoring and stuff like that and finally we're going to be having a look using our handy dandy wall power meter doodad here at what kind of power consumption we see when we're hitting the whole system at once but let's start with a single vm baseline with all the other ones sitting idle and i'll show you guys on screen hopefully right now how i plan to go through this entire test suite and show you guys the scores so here we go we're getting a cinebench score of around 600 we're getting crystal disk mark scores in the area of sort of you know two gigabytes per second reads and around 400 megabytes per second writes to our array our memory scores we're seeing about five gigabytes per second so on average reads and writes to our quad channel ddr4 memory and our 3dmark firestrike extreme score is 61.48 so the next test and this one i will need some helping hands for is going to be to hit all seven vms at once for our baseline score to see what happens when they have to actually share resources which especially for things like memory it's not very pleasant sometimes okay so i've assembled a crack squad of helpers whose intelligence and physical coordination lead me to believe that it is probable nay likely which are both kind of the same thing that they will be able to perform the skills that i set out for them today task actually not skills don't worry too much about that basically what you guys have to do is all press a button at the same time not gonna work okay colton you're fired again thank you okay so two of you will have to press two buttons at once at the same time johnny you got this okay johnny you're on machines one and two yvonne you're on machine three colton you're here nick you're here and i'll go over there and i will tell you which button to press and you will all press it at the same time you're gonna click the button that says run next to cpu in the cinebench r15 program has everyone got your cursor positioned yes okay so i'm gonna say that don't do it yet i guess taran's not here i don't have to give instructions like that okay i already did it three two one go okay so you can see here with our seven instances of cinebench running we are actually pinning the entire cpu here at 100 usage that was exactly our intent and will tell us without any extra turbo boost for only activating a couple of cores at a time how all of our vms can run in a worst case scenario where they are sharing as much resources as possible okay so we're scoring around 500 points which is about a hundred lower than we did when we were just running it on a single vm fascinating okay everyone ready three two one go okay so this is interesting on the read side of things really there wasn't much of an effect from the numbers i've looked at so far but on the right side of things some of our vms were so starved for disk time that they actually timed out on their sequential right benchmark very very interesting this isn't something we're going to retest after we overclock because we can't overclock storage but i just wanted to have this as just a for my information sort of number ida 64 cache and memory benchmark it's a gray window this one i'm really interested in because desktops really don't care much about their memory bandwidth these days i mean dual channel quad channel ddr3 ddr4 it's all fast enough but if you're trying to hit something with seven vms at once i'm expecting the performance to be affected somewhat it's this is really interesting so you can actually see the systems are running the benchmarks at different speeds mix vm over here so this is player number five is actually still running the memory benchmarks or at least it was before i uh and mine is almost done running all of the level one and level two cash benchmarks so it does seem like their ability to even run these tests is affected by the fact that we're hitting them all at once here we go last one position your cursor over run three two one fire strike extreme okay you guys are dismissed for now thank you i'll call you back once i overclock the system so check this out this is what our memory and cash benchmarking looked like this is what our benchmarking looks like in fire strike extreme so with seven instances of it running we're actually getting up near 100 utilization closer to like 90 here okay very interesting so 3d mark scores not affected much by our cpu and ram sharing because 3d bark is mostly dependent on the graphics card and each vm has its own r9 nano so all that's left now to do is to record our score so we can create some average score graphs for you guys and establish our baseline so that we can find out if our overclocking helps now most server motherboard makers do not have any overclocking features but this is asus and this is technically a ws or workstation board so in the ai tweaker menu we've got their ai overclock tuner which has two settings neither of which i have played with at all manual and oc tune so i'm just gonna go let's oc tune it level three and find out if the system works there's a very good chance it's not going to work i have not tested this at all so this is actually a really bizarre quirk of this system it starts up here if it turns on at all it starts up here oh wow yep that's not posting let's clear cmos and then uh we will go from there okay let's see if that does anything oh that was it i need this bar to get past like here well that wasn't it like i i oh i know what it is because we did a cmos clear that bio setting that i need the 4g decoding setting is not enabled so we are not able to boot with all of these pci devices so maybe by unplugging all the video cards i will be able to have them not get picked up and i will be able to get into the bios this is how you remove the graphics cards from seven gamers one cpu there we go okay they're out so now we can try again okay so that was it the problem with having a system that doesn't post in its default configuration okay so let's try manual this time um my understanding is that on these types of boards you can expect somewhere in the neighborhood of like 105 megahertz so just for lulls let's try 105 and see what happens i'm guessing not a whole lot and that's what i got okay then okay so after four attempts we're back in the bios our setting did stick but obviously didn't work so let's try a more conservative 103 which would be a three percent overclock okay so because we have no video card we have to use vnc to get into our vm and find out if everything is working as intended well that is not reporting correctly at all so that's a thing so we're gonna have to run a benchmark and find out okay i tell you vms really screw up hardware reporting both cpu-z and ida 64 are reporting numbers that would indicate that our cpu is not overclocked but cinebench is reporting that it is overclocked and even though these scores are not directly comparable because we don't even have any of the other vms booted we're getting 900 in cinebench which would indicate that everything's working properly at the very least so now we can proceed to the next step and put our graphics cards back in okay all our video cards are showing up which basically means we can start the array and fire up our vms did it just do that or did you do that hey all right so now it is time to overclock our video cards now the r9 nano isn't uh really known to be much of an overclocker but we're gonna go ahead and increase the power limit as high as it goes and we're gonna increase our core clock to like i don't know 10 50 and see what happens hey graphics 10.50 megahertz just like that i guess water cooling helps a little bit with the whole overclocking the r9 nano situation very nice what the hell afterburner is detecting all seven gpus that shouldn't be possible because we've passed them through to separate vms it's also detecting wow afterburner doesn't know what's going on so it's got them all being used while we're running the benchmark so it knows there's seven but it doesn't know that it's only using one of them and it's just cloning this core clock graph which actually has the card not reaching uh not reaching a thousand megahertz anyway so i guess all that's left now then is to run some benchmarks and find out if we got any benefit for our trouble everyone ready overclock cinebench benchmark what damn it nick if i'd wanted someone to just start the benchmark early i'd have asked aaron to help please work please work please work no no what no just kidding player whatever it is so it's one two three four five six seven and then you put oc scores in a bench but my keyboard says six don't worry about that okay actually that does seem to be faster yeah 40 points better online everyone ready ready three two one run it please don't crash why it's okay give it time power draw 1600 watts so did everything but next launch okay so after much struggling we managed to achieve whopping overclocks of anywhere from zero to 70 megahertz on our graphics cards yielding fire strike extreme scores in the very very close to what we were already getting range leading us to believe that this whole thing was a terrible idea but i'm really glad that you guys got to come along for the adventure with us because um that is what we do on this channel that is what we do this is a sponsor spot i have been looking forward to for quite some time we recover data.com what they do is pretty obvious they recover data and why we're affiliated with them will be pretty obvious if you checked out the data recovery vlog which if you haven't already is a pretty uh pretty exciting piece of content as far as they go on this channel anyway they gave me some bullet points to talk about and i will do that but then i'll get into why they're so special to me so first of all they're one of the only data recovery companies to invest in r d so if the technology to recover your data doesn't exist they create it they're fast they're tech savvy they have friendly customer service available 24 7 and that was indeed my experience their data recovery guarantee policy means that if they don't recover any data there is no recovery fee they have worldwide emergency data response options including on-site remote and in lab that's 24 7 365. they've got state-of-the-art equipment utilizing today's most advanced technology with proprietary in-house developed tools they've got iso 4 class 10 and iso 5 class 100 clean rooms to enable them to provide a optimum solution for a recovery environment and basically what it boils down to for me is they got my data back it was an extremely complicated raid array not a recommended raid array so i had three raid fives that were hardware raid fives on separate lsi controllers and then i had those striped together in raid 0 for an effective raid 50 so three raid 5 stripes in windows i thought it should be pretty safe because i can lose up to one ssd per controller before i should run into any issues but what i didn't account for is losing a controller outright so one of the controllers failed causing the array to go into an unrecoverable state and werecoverdata.com had me plug in all those 24 drives to a host bus adapter and they were able to remotely using their own linux tool reconstruct the whole thing allow me to copy it off and basically save my turkey which thanks to those guys and if you guys have a data recovery emergency then check them out the link is at the video description i heartily endorse we recover data dot com so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video hit the dislike button but if you liked it and you thought it was crazy and awesome and extreme hit the like button get subscribed and maybe even consider supporting us by buying a cool shirt like this one changing your amazon bookmarks one car affiliate code instructions for which we're up there or just contributing directly through our all new linus tech tips forum freshly updated for 2016 which you can check out at the link in the video description and now that you're done watching this and you're wondering hey what should i watch next maybe check out the video where i show you how to quadruple your network speed for 100 bucks that is assuming that you have a couple of really good computers already and you have like networking equipment etc etc terms and conditions things up there\n"