OverClocking GPU Safley Advice needed :¬)

to be honest, im not a wiz at oc'ing graphics myself. from my experience and wat iv heard from ppl and read in forumes/reviews,

stock cooling shud b alrite, unless you want to do some uber voltmodding hardcore stuff

no graphics cards are the same as each other, so what one person gets may be diff to another. to get a good idea of how far a card can clock, google reviews on it. most sites will test overclocking capability. get an average and aim for a figure slightly lower to be on the safe side and allow for variations

temps - its quite common for modern gpus to get up to the 90's range; nearly all modern card have a built in thermal sensor so they auto throttle back the clockspeed if the temps get too high. note - make sure when you overclock, benchmark with every increase and note the fps, when the fps starts to suddenly go down, youve hit the limit (or if you see glitches in the images). pull back the card a couple of steps just to be on the safe side

i use Lavalys's EVEREST program to show my GPU's temp. I overclocked my 6600GT to 580/1160 and the temp goes max 60 when im playing ut2004. But I do have the pc in a very cold room so I can overclock alot. If you seen on the new test on the 8800 nvidia cards on Toms Hardware I saw the X1950XTX card go to 89C so thats the temps they go to. Much higher than CPU's. I've never had a good ATI card so I don't know how they overclock but with nVidia's one I use the control panel and find the best settings for memory and core speed. Then I test it and if it doesnt mess up the screen then I apply it and let it set the gpu to that speed everytime windows starts up. Don't worry you can't break your graphics card. Worst thing is your pc will lock up.

yes i read his post and i gave him some advice. i didn't say 90 is a normal temp. its the normal temp under heavy load. thats the temps of most high end graphics cards nowadays.

Strange as the stock clock speeds should be near 625/1800 (900). :?:

Here's a link to a x1950xt that was able to reach 668/945 (@82C) Sapphire x1950xt review.

I suggest that you download and install ATI Tool 0.26.

With this tool you can:
1) Press the "Find Max Core" button to find your max stable core clock.
2) Press the "Fix Max Mem" button to find your max stable memory clock.
3) Press the "Scan for Artifacts" button to check for issues with these clock speeds.

Alternatively, you can move the sliders manually and then check for artifacts.

For safety, you would want to do the following:
i) Press the "Check for Artifacts" button to ensure that your stock clocks are stable.
ii) Press the Settings button (bottom right) and on the Overclocking page set a Core and Mem Clock safety range to prevent blue screens. I suggest a core max of 530 and memory max of 615.
iii) In the Artifact Scanning settings, set a Stop scanning after time of 300 secs.
iv) If you see a lot of artifacts (yellow dots) then you should manually stop clock scanning by pressing the Abort button and lower that clock slider a little and manually retest for artifacts.

It is highly recommended that you reduce the auto detected clocks by 10-20MHz for an additional safety margin.

Good luck.

90c is not normal in any load anything over 60 is too hot. What kind of advice is that 90c underfull load. GPU and CPU need to be under 60c for best performance. My system I worry if the temps reach 35c but that never happens the cooler the better

If that was in my system it would be 30 to 35 oc'ed to the max

I'm inclined to agree with gomerpile on the temps thing, although with different tolerances.

Anything below 65ºC is good. Remember the hotter the silicon is, the worse it performs and the quicker it fails. Even though the card will be stable at 90º, it won't last as long, or perfom anywhere NEAR as well, as it would at 80º. The lower the temp the better the performance and the longer the card will last.

Do try to cool the card down as far as you can - the heat doesn't only affect the physical GPU chip itself, the components around it (and around the heatsink attached to it) will get irradiated with heat, reducing their performance and lifespan. I'm not talking about components like other PCI/PCI-E peripherals (although these are included), I'm talking about the little components like capacitors, resistors, diodes and so on on the gfx card itself. The hotter they get, the less effectively they work, and they won't last as well.

You'll probably find that gomerpile is running one hell of a cooling system there with those temps - probably one which took a while to design, build and test, I'm guessing.

EDIT: actually, 90ºC on a gfx card is definitely not healthy. I'm remembering a SBLive! I had that got slightly cooked by an overenthusiastic MX440 a number of years ago. This was after a heatsink upgrade and a fan install, look you.

I certainly won't dispute that point - prolonged high heat does horten the life of components.

As an off the topic point, how did the mx4400 cook the sound card? I thought the fans blew the air out horizontal to the card? Or is this some custom vendor designed hsink?

i was only going to over clock it because the proformance wasn't that good and i though it was the clocks but i have asked somepeople and they say that it is my CPU bottlenecking i think

i am not sure what this is

but i have a
pentium 4 3.4ht

so i think it is my processor

what do you guys think

Pic one is the new design of the air box, this box replace the old build with the fan in the case.


pic 2
is the way it use to be without the new addition of the box, I was able to restrict the air flow to blow straight through the case cooling down all parts. I have tested this by turning off the back fan and without it the cpu temps reach above 40c and when I turn it on playing hard core games it cools down to 25 after 3 mins case temp are 12 to 15 everything oc'ed to death and volted.