Overclock nVidia Card TO THE LIMIT

Will_hendrix

This is for every one who likes to like on the edge a little, well as far as maby losing hundreds of euros worth of hardware goes.

Overclocking is a risky practice and if you are going to attempt it you should be confident in what your doing and be sure there is no one but your self to blame for blowing that new card. This is just my guide which was prompted by a query i answered.

First of all every card has its own treshold with regard to how far you can take it so don't get excited a ramp up the frequencies. the first thing you need is proper cooling. a system with an intake fan at the base, an exhaust fan beside the PSU, round cable IDE's (cause strap reduce airflow) and at lest the 2 nearest PCI slots open beside the AGP port, 512mb of the fastest ram you can use, DDR PC3200 if possible, and a good Antac powersuppily of at least 480w or other good brand for maximum stability, and if your really mad, you can mount a water cooler onto the GPU itself.

Keep in mind also that the speed and bus side of the gpu also determines how much your system can handle before becoming unstable.

once all that is sorted get yourself the latest betas from nVidia, they have the CoolBitz overclocking tool built into it or maby installed rivatuner. within riva tuner in the card settings install nvstrap! this is a card unlocking protocal, select allow unlocking of masked pixel pipelines and then enter the GPU config and select all the pipelines that dont have a tick beside it, then you will be prompted to restart.

once restarted run the highest end pc game you have and the secound there are black scan lines, texture curruptions of hundreds of little black dots on the textures, exit the game and uninstall nvstrap within rivatuner, this will mean that the pipelines on the card are faulty, (Hence why this card its not the GT or ultra edition) and were locked by the manufactures, if there are no errors, count your self luckey to be getting a great proformance boost, also be sure to test hich end games thurally if you don't get errors, cause if you dont and the pipelines are faulty you could not only damage the card but the whole system.

As for the overclocking... this is a tremendously thedious b*t*h of a patience taker. first raise the ram frequency on the card 5 mhz, then appily, run a high bitrate video for about 20-30 minits paying colse attention to detail, looking for scan lines, artifacts, or anything else out of the ordinary, keep doing this in 5 mhz intervuls until some sort of error in the video occours and then reduce the frequency by 10mhz, for safety reasons, dont forget to appily the settings after every 5mhz raise.

now its time to "kick the crap" out of the ram, run the highest end pc games you can get your hands on, farcry, doom 3, halflife 2, UT 2004 to name a few and max out the texture quaility setting, this forces the ram to take the full load. you will need to try this on several games for a good solid 5 or 6 hours looking closely for errors in the textures just as with the video and the same way with the pipelines. if after 5 hours your happy repeat the same 5 mhz raise, and test process with the clock frequency, first with the 20 minit per raise high bitrate videos and when you have a video artifact or scan-line ect. have to go now, will update this tread another day

happy overclocking

KdjaCL

or you could do this


kdjac

Venom

Coolbits is not in the beta drivers for a start, its in all nVidia drivers. Coolbit2 (get the latest) is a little file you can download that when run adds a line into your registry that un-hides various options in the nVidia driver menu screen.

One of these new screens is the overclocking menu. Select manual overclock and click the optimise button for the 3D slider and it will get the safest setting your card can handle. You can push the slider a little more but if the stability test fails you will need to move it back a tad a try again.

padraigf

You dont need PC3200 ram to overclock your graphics card, its completely irrelevant.
You also definately dont need a 480w or better Antec powersupply. Thats enough for 2 overlocked 6800 Ultras in SLI!

Overclocking TO THE LIMIT would also kind of suggest doing something a little more extreme such as a bios flash for more voltage or something...

KdjaCL

padraigf wrote:

Overclocking TO THE LIMIT would also kind of suggest doing something a little more extreme such as a bios flash for more voltage or something...

Yah i was hoping for some fire n stuff in this thread:(


I blew up a 9200SE thats OCIng to the pepsi max or sumting.

kdjac

duridian

I was actually expecting something a bit more dramatic (or at least new) from the heading of this topic.