8800GT Overclocking. Not that big of a boost.

chiptouz

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Sep 12, 2006
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Hello All,

I did some overclocking last night on my XFX 8800gt Extreme and I was not all that impressed with the results. I overclocked the GPU from 640 to 701, Shaders from 1650 to 1750, and Memory from 950 (1900) to 1000 (2000). Prior to the overclock I had 11,100 3dmarks and after I had 11,430. To me that is only about a 3% increase in performance. For that little it seemed not worth it to overclock.

What are your results? What are the maximums that you are getting. Finally, did you keep the overclock?

Athlon64 X2 6400+ Zalman 9500
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
2 GB Corsair XMS DDR2 6400C4
XFX 8800GT Extreme (640, 1950)
Viewsonic VX922
Creative Audigy4
1x WD Sata2 250gb
1x Maxtor 120gb IDE
Mushkin 550W
Cooler Master Centurion5
Logitech G5 & G15
 

japps2

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Oct 16, 2007
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What CPU do you have? everything I have read suggests that your CPU could be the bottleneck on the 8800GT. You should be good if you're running a q6600 or above.
 

bildo123

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I dunno, I think the X2 6400 has the horsepower to ride with the 8800GT. I remember OC my video card back in the day a 9800 pro, I OC it about 60mhz at the core like he did and noticed no visual performance increase, let alone a synthetic test. I remember OC an old XP +2000 to a +2600 too :p didnt notice a difference back then either, thats why I was always skeptical about OC and money involved in it. But hopefully this E2180 will OC well, I hope..
 

Hatman

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You may be slightly bottlenecked, not use though..

In actual games the performance may be a lot different. Remember with 16rops to do AA coreclock will help a lot, 3dmark06 uses no AA, and also some games use up all its memory bandwidth so more of that helps a lot, 3dmark06 doesnt.

Aside from all that its a combination of 3d score AND cpu score, you you wont see teh boost in 3dmark06 that you'll see in games.

Tbh it wasn't a very big overclock anyway. On the shaders it was a 6% increase, next to nothing.
 

choirbass

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from what ive read, OCing a gpu supposedly results in a noticably worthwhile performance improvement... but by the same token, even a 10% OC is considered 'noticably worthwhile', whereas on cpus that would be considered not really worth it at all. for a cpu, unless you OC by at least a few hundred MHz, it probably isnt worth it much either... as its still gravitating around stock speeds.

@bildo123 for a cpu containing more than 1 core... the difference is more pronounced, what might only be a 400MHz OC on a single core, would result in an effective ~800MHz increase for a dual core in SMP aware applications, as you usually wont get 100% usage with SMP, closer to 80%+ typically, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on how well the application was coded.

i agree though, when i OCd my single core s462, the difference wasnt worth it, as there really wasnt much of one to speak of.
 

Flingpoo

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Oct 27, 2007
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I did a little experiment over at this thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=33&post=246058&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0

I got a huge increase in score with 3Dmark06.
I went from 12970 at stock speeds to 13552. (look at post #6 for my final results)

Stock eVGA 8800GT SuperClocked speeds @ 650/1900
bumped it up to SSC speeds @ 701/2000

The experiment was more about FPS results after overclocked. Not much of a gain in actual FPS, but big bump in 3Dmark.

Did I keep the overclock? Hell yes! :D