MSI Responds to GTX 660 Ti, 670 Power Edition Overvolting

MSI issues a new statement reaffirming its confidence in its video cards.

Last week, we brought news from our Tom's Hardware Germany team's discovery that MSI was overvolting the GPUs on the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 670 Ti Power Edition boards (Google Translate) to achieve a higher and longer lasting GPU boost state by basically circumventing the PWM controller.

MSI commented on our report with the following statement:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't all software modding utilities have built-in hard limits?

Report: Nvidia to Give Green Light for Video Card Designs

Intel Nvidia (sic) is reportedly cracking down on graphics card designs that do not meet the company's approval.

Apparently, Nvidia is enforcing its Green Light program, which requires graphics card makers to send in their designs for Nvidia's approval. The approval will not be given if certain noise, power, voltage and heat levels are not met. Without that approval, those cards cannot be sold. Bright Side of News said that EVGA was one of the first to feel Nvidia's whip and had to remove the EVBot voltage control tool from the EVGA GTX 680 Classified.

Of course, it's easy to chastise Nvidia for this type of control, which will not allow extreme graphics cards configurations anymore. However, Nvidia's brand and perception are exposed with every card that is sold and it is understandable that the company wants to make sure that it is represented in the way it wants. Extreme designs that go overboard are unlikely to meet the specifications of Nvidia's marketing promises and are likely to be shot down.

It's not exactly what the enthusiast's heart desires and it most certainly impacts the creativity of vendors, which will have an even tougher time to differentiate its parts from the competition. But if you argue from Nvidia's point of view, then - if the Green Light report is true - the company surely has a case.

I'm seriously considering going with AMD this next time. They just need to step up their game a tad more to give Nvidia some real competition. I just read about the stats on the 7990 vs the gtx690. And unfortunately, it falls quite short.

MSI Caught Overvolting GTX 660 Ti, 670 Power Edition Cards

If a company changes its product in the middle of a production run after an error becomes public, you know something’s fishy. If Nvidia steps in as well, that’s a good indication there’s something serious going on. Here’s what happened at MSI.

Our colleagues over at Tom’s Hardware Germany seem to have caught MSI red handed, overvolting the GPUs on the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 670 Ti Power Edition boards (Google Translate) to achieve a higher and longer lasting GPU boost state by basically circumventing the PWM controller. In other words, MSI was cheating. Perhaps no one would ever have known if it hadn’t been for one side effect. The increased voltage can cause the system to refuse to POST.

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To verify our findings and analyze their cause, we conducted some of our own research, enlisting the help of our own UK community member starcraftgod who was also affected by the issue. After comparing notes and measurements, we took a closer look at the circuit board itself. What we found there was unexpected to say the least, and it’s almost hard to believe an engineer would create something like this on purpose. In short, the PWM controller on said cards is overvolted by up to 88 percent using a small alteration to its power supply, which leads to the chip running way outside of its specifications and at significantly deviating characteristic lines. This means that too much voltage is being applied to the GPU in general and the voltage reduction under load (droop) is not as large as it should be -- and that's just one side of the story. The other is that MSI’s tinkering can cause serious side effects.

So what’s happening? A small component completely superfluous to the normal circuit in one of the ground connections causes major overvoltage in the PWM chip in question – instead of the 5 volts specified by Richtek, the chip is hit with up to 9.3 volts. That can’t be good for its life expectancy in the long run and also causes the issues we mentioned above. In combination with some PSUs, the system will be unable to start up if the 12 volt rail has to provide more that 12 volts to one of the PowerEdition models (even within the ATX spec). In other cases, MSI’s circuit trick can trigger a black screen or cause a driver crash when a change of load occurs. We find it hard to believe in a design accident here, since the circuit in question is a standard design – if implemented correctly.

MSI got back to us with a very enlightening statement. Here’s an excerpt: