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I recently bought a new video card for myself. I bought a new nvidia geforce 6800xt video card. I have no ideas as what to perform while overclocking this video card. I never tried the overclocking stuff and i am scared for my new video card.
Please provide some steps as how to proceed
As you were told "way back when", the 6800XT is not much better than the 6600GT it replaced...it's close enough to be called a tie. The "XT" in the model number should be a dead give away to it's performance. nVidia uses XT for it's lower end versions in a series. ATI on the other hand, uses XT for it's higher end versions in a series.
The 6800XT only has 8 pipelines & 4 shaders. The plain vanilla 6800 has 12 pipelines & 5 shaders. The 6600GT has 8 piplines & 4 shaders, plus it uses GDDR3 memory. Your 6800XT probably has GDDR2. And if the default core clock on your card was 375MHz, it was already factory overclocked because 325MHz is the reference core clock.
If you can, post a link that shows a 6800XT overclocked to 500MHz. You may find one or two, but it's definitely the exception, not the rule. 400-450MHz is much more reasonable. If you think you can hit 500MHz, go for it!
that overclock should be fine i pushed my 6800 vanilla from 350core/700mem all the way up to 525core and 1.05ghz ram. its was stable for only 4 hours but fear puts a pretty large strain on the gpu. and your memory will need to be cooled they can hit around the 50C-60C mark when overclocked and uncooled. your core overclock should be safe just dont push it any further
Did you try lowering it to 500 core to see if that made it stable? I really want to get to 500, I was just unsure how much these 6800 cores could take, and I definately dont want to fry the card in a few days. Anyone know the clock from a 6800 GT or an ULTRA?
Thanks for the suggestion on the memory. I do have heatsinks on the way. Ya know, i could swear that my friends GT had a memory temp monitor too, but mine only has a GPU temp monitor.
With that said, how long do you think my graphics card would last on a 450 (or even 500) mhz clock? Keep in mind that it is watercooled and the temp bar is always in the green.
A possible solution i thought about was the lack of cooling on my memory modules. They dont appear hot (but very warm) when I touch them. Is it possible the card is throttling the modules back to stop overheating and therefore affecting my score? Or could it be that xfx has already overclocked them from 700 to 1000 and thus resulting in a poor 'additional' overclock?
Secondly, what do you think of the overclock on the core. Too much? I receive a jump of 800 3dmark05 points and a whopping 10 fps increase from the video stress test in CS: Source. My old 6600GT overclocked from 500 to 540 stable. Im scared that the 100mhz increase in clock would be too much for my card. I would like to have it run at least 2 or 3 years on as high of an overclock as I can reach.