ASIC. Does it really make a difference?

[stereophonie]

I have recently purchased a Gainward GTX 770, the card is fantastic and I'm very happy with it. One thing it isn't very good at though is overclocking. My friend asked my what my ASIC is on the card as this may be my problem but he couldn't give me any proper details as to why. A Google search has left me pretty confused as to whether it makes a difference to overclocking or not. Can someone shed some light on this? My ASIC is 76.4%.

[NInety]

ASIC? I thought you were talking about mining..... I have no idea what you're talking about.

[TheRetiredSlave]

An ASIC is an "Application Specific Integrated Circuit".. In other words, it's a custom chip designed to do only one specific purpose (IE, mine bitcoin), which it can do extremely efficiently. 

 

Your friend is misusing the term. Ask him to clarify what he means.

 

 

 

Edit: Just for reference, the issue with general-purpose computing hardware (IE, CPUs/GPUs) is that since they're designed to be able to do anything, they're inherently less efficient at performing any one specific task (because they need extra circuits in order to be able to perform any of the random tasks you may do with your PC).. Since an ASIC is a chip that's built specifically for one purpose, it can carry out that one specific task extremely efficiently (because it doesn't need any extra circuits), but the caveat is that the ASIC isn't be able to do anything else. 

[stereophonie]

An ASIC is an Application-Specific-Integrated-Circuit.. In other words, it's a custom chip designed to do only one specific purpose, which it can do extremely efficiently.

I got that much from Google. What does my percentage mean to me and what does it mean in terms of overclocking potential though? I heard around 75% is decent yet my GPU just doesn't like being overclocked.

[TheRetiredSlave]

I got that much from Google. What does my percentage mean to me and what does it mean in terms of overclocking potential though? I heard around 75% is decent yet my GPU just doesn't like being overclocked.

 

Nothing.. GPUs aren't ASICs, and there is no part of a GPU (that I'm aware of), that's referred to as an ASIC.. Where did you read that percentage?

 

Edit: Googled "ASIC quality".. From what I can tell, they're effectively referring to the quality of the GPU chip itself... IE, some chips overclock better than others, and chips that are a higher quality can overclock higher with less voltage.

 

For example, my i7-4770K barely does 4.3 Ghz, but some people are able to push their 4770K to 4.8+ with similar voltages to mine.. Even though mine is good enough to run at Intel's specified speeds, the other guy's chip happened to be built with a higher quality than mine, and thus can overclock better.. The same idea can be applied to GPUs, some will do 1300 while some will struggle with 1150. We've known that chips with OC differently for as long as OC'ing has been a thing.

 

Now, I still have no idea why this would be referred to as "ASIC quality"..

[W-L]

I got that much from Google. What does my percentage mean to me and what does it mean in terms of overclocking potential though? I heard around 75% is decent yet my GPU just doesn't like being overclocked.

 

ASIC is for coin mining, overclock potential on a card is determined by the design of the power delivery, cooling and binning of the GPU core in basic terms, not ASIC. 

[Wtalk2]

I had to search what your were talking about but I found that GPU-Z gives these ASIC Quality Scores. From my understanding it rates qualities such as power consumption, voltages ETC. and it really doesn't matter for pure performance since my ASIC score is 84.8% on a Asus GTX 760 and your 770 is much faster than my 760 so scores really don't affect performance. There isn't very much info on it though so I am sorry if any of my info is wrong.

[stereophonie]

I got my ASIC information from GPU-Z. I think it is starting to become clear that my friend may be talking out of his ass...

[TheRetiredSlave]

I got my ASIC information from GPU-Z. I think it is starting to become clear that my friend may be talking out of his ass...

 

I edited my previous posts.. He's not talking completely out of his ass, he's just using a random term that nobody (including myself) knows or uses in this context.

[W-L]

I edited my previous posts.. He's not talking completely out of his ass, he's just using a random term that nobody (including myself) knows or uses in this context.

 

Can't any dedicated electrical part be classified as an ASIC then, like a GPU since it's made for outputting graphics, and a mining card since it's designed for high speed calculations, both would be ASIC but for different applications. Besides doens't everyone jstu called a  better overclocking chip and golden or high binned chip theses days I've never heard of the term ASIC used this way before

[TheRetiredSlave]

Can't any dedicated electrical part be classified as an ASIC then, like a GPU since it's made for outputting graphics, and a mining card since it's designed for high speed calculations, both would be ASIC but for different applications. Besides doens't everyone jstu called a  better overclocking chip and golden or high binned chip theses days I've never heard of the term ASIC used this way before

 

No, a GPU wouldn't be referred to as a "graphics ASIC" because GPUs are designed to be able run any sort of code you throw at them, whether it be a game/benchmark (using DX9/10/11/12, OpenGL, Mantle, etc), any sort of bulk computation like password cracking, or CUDA acceleration in video editing.. The term ASIC is talking about something much more specific, as in the entire design of the chip and PCB is built around a single set of code. For bitcoin mining, the ASICs are built to do SHA-256 hashing and SHA-256 hashing only. There is absolutely nothing else you can do with it.