Overclocking question

bretttp1

I was wondering if anyone has experience using the overclock tool supplied with NVIDIA cards called ntune, I've never overclocked before and I was going to use this tool as it does all the adjustments itself, as I have no idea what to try!

The spec of my system is as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.2GHz Socket 939, 1MB
EPoX EP-9NPA+ SLI,nForce4 SLI,Socket-939 ,ATX,S-ATA2,GbLAN,Firewire,DDR, PCI-Ex16.
Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB Kit w/two matched Value Select 512MB
NorthQ 4775-500BULK, ATX 500W, 120mm Fan, 12-17dBA, 4xSATA, SLI, 20/24pin
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
Samsung DVD±RW burner, SH-W162L, 16x, Dual, LightScribe
POINT OF VIEW GeForce 6800GS 256MB GDDR3, PCI-Express, 425Mhz/1GHz
Gigabyte GZ-FSCA1-AN Aurora Black Aluminium Body

I'm having frame slow down issues on Ghost Recon advanced war fighter no matter what I adjust in the graphics dept. hence the idea to overclock.
I was also thinking of getting oblivion, but now I'm thinking my rig will stand no chance of playing it!
Will using ntune make any difference or am I at risk of damaging my system?

Or will I just splash out on a second 6800gs in sli?

Any thoughts would be great.

8T8

From what I've seen GRAW has a very poorly performing game engine and frame-rate issues are a common problem.

I highly recommend you read TweakGuides GRAW guide as they usually nail down what causes the biggest dips in performance and/or how to increase performance with lots of tip/tweaks near the end of the guide as well that potentially could be the cause of the slow down & mean it's not GPU related.

nTune uses specific hooks in the bios in order to work it's overclocking mojo if these are not present in your motherboards bios (which is unfortunately very common) then nTune wont be able to tweak various settings. As for overclocking I don't know if you will get that much of it without some serious overclocks it's a bit of a dark art sometimes especially if you are new to it.

Personally I think going SLI would be the better option if you get a card cheap enough, Komplett have a clearance grade PCI-E 6800GS going for €141 which is not too bad at all. A dual GPU setup will definitely improve the minimum frame-rate and help in those situations were the game might bog down with a lot going on.

bretttp1

Thanks a mill 8T8, those links are full of info, and now that 6800gs you pointed out is very tempting! I was going to hold off till they dropped in price anyway, but thats just brought all that forward a bit!

Do you think the amd 3700+ could be a bottle neck if I do go sli?

8T8

You're CPU is fine (I have an X2 4400+ who's cores are clocked the same as your 3700+) it should be fine for SLI, the 6800GS SLI will be kept busy even at 1280x1024.

TES:Oblivion should run okay anyway even without SLI 6800GS.