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Is it possible that my PSU is limiting my ability to overclock my 7990? I've had terrible luck overclocking crossfire 7970s and now am having pretty much the same experience with this single PCB 7990.

Trying to do the usual incremental overclocking with applicable voltage bumps but I wonder if the overclock is taxing my PSU to its limits and causing the instability. My card is voltage unlocked as you can see in the picture. enter image description here

I can't get above 1050 and no matter what I put the voltage to pumping more juice doesn't increase stability. I either get the DXGUI_DEVICE_REMOVED or display driver crashes instantly at anything over 1050. I've tried un-syncing settings for similar graphics processors in apps like Afterburner and Trixx but since it is a single board I don't get a voltage option on the second GPU.

I have the XFX 850W black edition from a while back that was 80 Plus Silver certified. But I am also running a 2500k OC'd to 4.6 ghz, 2 mechanical drives(Samsung F3s), 1 SSD, 3 Aerocool Shark case fans, 1 200m top fan, and the 2 fans on my NH-D14 all hooked up to my fan my controller.

Any ideas?

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I disagree with @JoeLansing - One of the key things to overclocking is a stable power supply. When I had to overclock a mission-critical machine, the things the experts looked at were the power supply, the VRM (Voltage Regulator Module) and, of-course the cooling. Its possible you just can't overclock the stuff because you are unlucky, but certainly a cheap power supply can cause issues. (See here, here and here for supporting evidence it could definately be a PSU problem)

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  • Well the power supply isn't necessarily "cheap". It got a really good review on johnnyguru regarding its clean supply, efficiency, ripple, rails, etc. All the important things that make a quality PSU a quality PSU. It's a XFX brand but has SeaSonic internals. I'm just wondering if the fact that my entire system could be drawing close to the maximum wattage from the unit that it's not leaving any room to supply additional juice to the card which is why increasing the voltage doesn't do anything. @davidgo
    – Christopher Bruce
    Aug 16, 2013 at 21:08
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I doubt it's your power supply. Your problem may be that you are trying to overclock the crap out of everything and it's not supported. Do the guys over at Overclockers.net have any hints? When you start overclocking everything it's not supposed to all work. If it does you have good karma. If parts of it fail you are normal.
- Joe

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You could try not overclocking the 2500k, disconnecting all your extra stuff (such as HDs and fans) and see if it will work then. If it works with all the extras removed, you will know it's the PSU.

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  • This could help, and is a good idea, but its not a definitive test. The importance of a good PSU to overclocking is not how heavily it can be loaded, rather how accurately it can hold a supply. In some (but not all) cases, decreasing the load will help the PSU work better because there is less changes (due to less load), and things like caps will drain less, helping with smoothing - but if the input is noisy and the PSU doesn't filter the noise adequately it might not help.
    – davidgo
    Aug 16, 2013 at 8:58

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