-
MSI is the official motherboard sponsor for Overdrive, providing
Nehalem and P45 platforms for the Championship. -
HyperX DDR3 modules are specifically engineered and designed to meet the rigorous
requirements of PC enthusiasts.HyperX modules rated at DDR3-2000+are used in the
Overdrive Championship -
Samsung Hard Drives and Optical Drives - The Center of Innovation
-
1,000 W modular 80plus high-efficiency EVEREST 1010 power supplies used for
the Overdrive Championship. -
Logitech's G11 gaming keyboard offers illuminated keys and 18 configurable
multi-purpose keys plus a USB hub. The G5 Laser Mouse allows adjustable
weight and up to 2000 dpi sensitivity for maximum precision.
- PCI Express 2.0 Graphics Cards Tested
- Best Gaming Graphics Cards for the Money: April 08
- Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX Review
- Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 Review
- The Best Gaming Graphics Cards for the Money: March 2008
- Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT Tested
- The Best Gaming Graphics Cards for the Money: February 2008
- ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 - Fastest Yet!
- Crossfire Meets PCI Express 2.0
- Exclusive: Nvidia GeForce 9800GX2
- Core2 Duo, Q6600, or Phenom 9950 BE ?
- 1st time PC builder with compatability question
- nehalem design will force power users to use extreme cpu's
- QX6850 Cooling
- Looking for a new, good CPU, need advice, Is it a good time to upgrde?
- Core 2 Quad and Duo Temperature Guide
- Overclocking help needed for Q6600 + MSI Neo-F V2
- general motherboard overclocking question
- strange problem
- I'm dumb, Please help
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: overclock, graphics, card
Topics: AMD/ATI, NVIDIA, Overclocking
Syndication:
Software or Hardware Overclocking?
It turns out that there are several ways to overclock your graphics card. We’ll take a look at each one in turn. First of all, you should know that you can overclock your card either temporarily, using Windows software utilities, or permanently by flashing your BIOS.
The Flexibility of Software
The first method is the best known. There are numerous utilities for AMD/ATI and Nvidia graphics cards. Their functions are often similar. The best ones let you set the operating speed of the GPU and the memory, but also the cooling power, and some let you load complete overclocking profiles and configurations of 3D functions to suit the application you’ll use. In fact, these utilities multiply the possibilities offered by the cards’ drivers. This implies that the ForceWare or Catalyst drivers are not totally ignorant of overclocking... And in fact, Nvidia and especially ATI are emphasizing overclockability more and more, which has become a strong sales argument. Software overclocking is very flexible to use (generally all you do is slide the frequency cursors and click "OK"), but it’s not free of drawbacks. It depends on a memory-resident program. That program consumes a small part of system resources, and can crash. The programs can contain bugs, or be incompatible with certain cards, certain driver versions or certain operating systems. What’s more, each time you re-boot the system you have to reconfigure everything.
Under the Hood
In short, a more permanent, more robust solution would be preferable – as with CPU overclocking, which won’t change unless you voluntarily modify the motherboard’s BIOS. And in fact, it works the same way with a graphics card. Permanent overclocking requires a change to the settings that are "hard-wired" in the card’s own BIOS. But while all you need to do to access your motherboard BIOS settings is press F1, F2 or Del when your PC is booting, the graphics card’s BIOS is not that easily accessible. You need a special utility to read and edit settings and save the new version, which will then be written to the card itself by flashing with yet another utility. Sound complicated? It may be, but it’s not at all impossible. And we’re here to tell you how to do it.
Keep Cool and Spend Your Money
However, if all this scares you, you can always go with a factory overclocked version, when the vendor does it for you. Models like this are extremely common, since third-party graphics cards manufacturers have found overclocking to be one way to set themselves apart from the competition. Certain ones, like XFX, may even owe all their success to the wide range of overclocked models they offer. But you should know that most of the time, pre-overclocked cards make you pay a lot for the few extra performance percentage points they offer.
Test configuration
Our tests were run on our reference system with an Asus P5E3 motherboard, an Intel QX6850 processor and 2 GB of Crucial DDR3. The operating system installed was the 32-bit version of Windows Vista SP1. For each card, we used the most recent versions of the drivers available at the time of the test – that is, ForceWare 174.53 and Catalyst 8.3.

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To any one interested in modding nVidia BIOS:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] w=0&nojs=0
brendano257 visit www.bootdisk.com and get those files.
A good idea for doing blind flashes is to have a second floppy (with the DOS files on obviously) but add a file called autoexec.bat with the following line in it:
nvlfash -4 -5 -6 -a -y file.rom
where file.rom is the filename and it could also be a .bin file. That will flash the card without you having to hope you typed it in right, just make sure you gave it a good minute or two before restarting so you don't corrupt the BIOS.
| randomizer : By the way, the first step in Nibitor is to select the device, before you can read the BIOS I'd like to know how you "deleted" the "Extra" frequencies. Did you set them to 0 or did you actually set the number of performance levels to 3 instead? |
Setting them to zero wouldn't work, you have to set them to dash ( - ), as you can see in the screenshot on page 6. AFAIK, Geforce 8 won't boot correctly if you suppress their "extra" performance level.
| matthieu lamelot : Setting them to zero wouldn't work, you have to set them to dash ( - ), as you can see in the screenshot on page 6. AFAIK, Geforce 8 won't boot correctly if you suppress their "extra" performance level. |
It's worth a try, you might get lucky.
| perzy : with the really extremly bad cooling on todays GPU's ...a little plastic fan with sleeve bearings that runs slower and slower before it stops completly.. i'm very cautious. New cooling? Yeah, but that costs and then i get a 10% oc. Hmm. |
So you want them to jack the prices up more? We get ripped off as it is until a year after stuff get's released.
| radium69 : benchmarks anywhere? i'd like to see performance in gaming benchmarks. Fairly interesting article. Could save me some $ |
Performance is as you would expect it to be : fairly on par with the frequency increase. Don't expect miracles here, but it's enough to climb one step on a manufacturer's performance scale. i.e. our overclocked Geforce 9600 GT was as fast as a regular 8800 GT. Of course you could go beyond that, should you manage to reach higher frequencies than us (better card, better cooling, voltage mod, etc.)
You got a nice overclock on that 9600GT. Mine won't play nicely in Crysis until I drop to 750MHz. Unfortunately ATITool can't detect artifacts no matter how much they fill the window with yellow, but just looking for them myself I didn't see any at 770MHz. Crysis just caused driver crashes all the time, which fortunately recovered every time. I only have my memory at 936MHz, I don't know how high I can go with that, but probably not far. The same crashes occur with the shader clock above 1770MHz. This was done via rivatuner with 174.74 drivers.
Just to let you know, the coders of NiBiTor are working on fan control, but they don't have enough 9 series BIOSs (especially 9600GT).
I got my 8800GT overclocked from 600Mhz Core to 691Mhz, 900Mhz memory to 1065Mhz and Shaders from 1500Mhz to 1728Mhz. It also ran stable at 700/1100/1750 but I decided to choose a little safer settings to flash the bios with. This overclock of about 17% gave me 16.3% better performance in 3D Mark 06! all that in no time! Thanks guys!!!
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I OC'ed my HD2900Pro 1GB to a 850MHz GPU (from 600MHz) and 2250MHz memory (from 1850MHz). So I technically got alomost a 50% OC. But mine is just a HD2900XT 1GB just down clocked.