Hi guys well i'm going to be overclocking my 8600gt and i have a question.

the 8600gt i have has a core speed of 540mhz and memory is 700mhz.
I have read the most you can go up to is 700mhz core and 850mhz memory, I probably won't go that high though.

My question is if i overclock it to the max possible it can go how much will it affect its lifespan, so how long would i expect it to last when it is overclocked and what is the normal life expectency of a graphics card?

Thanks

if temperatures are kept in a normal range, overclocking should have little to no effect on the cards life, and the card will last longer than how long you will be using it before an upgrade

out of every videocard that I have, they all have lasted longer than the PC them self, things like videocards are built quality just like the CPU's, they will last a long time as they don't design them in favor of breaking fast, (my geforce 2 is still under warranty as the warranty is lifetime so if it fails, I can mail it back and they will send me a new one. Most hardware like the CPU and videocard, are generally replaced long before they reach the end of their life cycle )

I recently picked up a new 8600 GT OC at a good deal and it has been working pretty well. I installed RivaTuner and started to increase the GPU and memory speeds but have not been able to get a noticeable performance increase. Using a similar set-up, I was able to get a 30% increase in FPS from a 7600 GS and even more from an 8800 GTS. I am at a loss why the 8600 GT is not responding as the others have. Temps are remaining cool and the monitoring software indicates that the GPU and memory speeds are higher but the FPS are the same.

Any ideas?

have you tried checking the hardware monitor to see if the overclocks are actually taking place,


with some cards, the overclock will not take place (this is usually common with the cards from BFG (for those cards you need the alternate startup features enabled in rivatuner )

also if a game is already running smooth, you wont notice a difference when overclocking

and for games that do not run well, you will usually only get around a 5-8FPS increase depending on the game and the screen resolution.

I keep the RivaTuner logging monitor running in the background and it confirms that the overclock is in effect. I am simply not seeing a corresponding performance increase with the OC.

The 8600 GT OC already has a pretty fast GPU and mem speed, right out of the box, but I was able increase those by almost another 100mhz. With the other 2 cards (8800 & 7600) I saw an immediate performance increase with the overclock.

I will try it again tonight and see if I can detect an improvement with any application that I have on the system.

Well I have overclocked the core to 600mhz and memory to 800mhz on mine and to be honest I haven't really been able to notice much of a performance increase, not even a little, I could try and overclock the shaders.

I know not to expect much from the 8600gt but I thought overclocking it would maybe help a little.

Edit: did a 3dmark06 basic test at stock and got 4800 3dmarks then did one with the overclock and got 5256 3dmarks

No,

Mine is the 8600 GT OC and the "stock" speed was already 580. I bumped it to 650 and saw a slight performance increase immediatey followed by extreme artifacts. Once the artifacts started they would not go away until I returned the settings to stock and re-booted it. Since there is not much room to OC this one, and little performance benefit, I set everything back to stock and will just live with it.

Just for reference, I am typing this on a computer with an 8800 GTS 640@650/950 that screams. I also have a 7600 GS that responded very well to it's OC. The 8600 is just a pig platform.

Mine is the xfx 8600 gt xxx factory 620 core and 800 memory i can boost to 902 memory and 702 core and i only get 2-5 fps better in lost planet extreme conditons however in benchmarking my scores are thought the roof higher however at touch it runs alot hotter i cant find a software that supports videocard temp if you find one let me know please.

x_2fast4u_x "Mine is the xfx 8600 gt xxx factory 620 core and 800 memory i can boost to 902 memory and 702 core and i only get 2-5 fps better in lost planet extreme conditons however in benchmarking my scores are thought the roof higher however at touch it runs alot hotter i cant find a software that supports videocard temp if you find one let me know please."

-Try with GPU-Z it shows you the card's banwidth, temp, model etc,,

I also have a 8600 gt with stock speeds of 540/700/ 1180. Actually I managed to overclock my card to 681 core, 960 memory and 1780 for the shader, for me it won´t go up any further. The temperatures are around 54 idle to 75-80 max.

Well I have a xfx 8600 GT (not the xxx)

The default clock speeds for the xfx cards seems to be a little different from most other 8600s. 620 core, 1350 shader and 800 memory, I'm not sure if that means xfx overclocks the cards themselves or if something else is going on.

I've just started getting into overclocking and i recently decided to get a vga cooler. I got the Thermalight V2 and it's overkill for this card, but i can always use it on my next one. So for now I'm trying to see how much I can get out of this thing (heat not being an issue).

I used RivaTuner to set the clocks to 702 core, 1620 shader and 891 mem, but I'm already getting some glitches after an hour or two of gaming. I think it's the core speed that may be too high and I could probably take the shader and memory speeds up a bit, but I'm really not sure, any opinions?

btw, with the cooler I'm using, even overclocked the temperatures never go over 63 degrees, it's impressive.

Hey x_2fast4u_x, RivaTuner shows me core temp in the hardware monitoring window, we have practically the same card, so that should probably work for you too.

Galaxy 8600GT OC (Coolviva gpu cooler) - factory overclock 600:800:1320 (core:mem:shader)
self oc - 675:875:1xxx (sorry can't remember)

The temp difference between my OC n from stock is negligible (perhaps it's in idle)...but I haven't test it during load

I've had my hands on almost every version of xfx 8600gt, they all look exactly the same, cept the 512 vs 256 mb boards...pretty sure they all run the same GPU, only diff is the ram is faster on the GTS.

Every one i have redone the bios with nibitor, for speeds of 720core/850 ram, and all of them are still running in friends computers! 720 pushes a little more heat...top stable speed on all of these cards was 745/core, ram varied dpending on version.

Edit: Didn't actually get to try a gts card.