Hardware Overclocking

[Digeman]

Hey guys! Here's the deal, i've gott a calibre 8800 gts (new version) and i'm thinking about overclocking. Well...simply put...i'm a complete and utter n00b at these sort of things and the questions i'm about to ask will probably seem very newbish but to me...they're not

Anyways here goes...well before i start the questions i have to mention that my friend sent me this program (Expertool) which can change the fan speed, check the gpu temperature, change configurations etc.etc.

Well i do some tinkering and find out that my card already was a bit overclocked. Now i raise all my settings about 50 mhz and tested it and everything seemed well. I play some crysis and then i tab down to check if the temperature was ok and noticed that it had gone all the way up to about 75 degrees (celcius) which made me panic and i quickly put static on the fan settings (it was on dynamic before) and put it on about 60% speed. Now the degrees go down to about 65-60 the panicattack went away. But then my friend sais having static is really bad unless you put it on 100% since if somethign happens and it gets warmer it wont chill it down.

So now i'm in another pickle. What temperatures are considered normal and safe for a gpu? What is like a good area for gpu temperature, a warning are and a danger area? What is actually better, having static or dynamic fan thingie? Will my fan get any harm done to itself if it spinns fast too long? What do you recommend i put my settings on to maximize (but not destroy or come near harming xD) my gpu?

Well those are all the questions i can come up with, any tips/advice on what to do? I'm gonna sleep now so prolly won't reply in about 9 hours so g'night and cya later

 

[Devil_Spawn]

if you have an 8800gts... do you really need to overclocking?
anyway... basically, gpus can stand much higher temperatures than cpus, i dont know about the 8800, but 75c seems fine to me, i would say that 90 is a temperate that should not be touched unless you simply must, and that the fan will eventually get damaged, so dont poke stuff in it, however chances are the fan will outlist the graphics card

 

[Pigiot]

if i were you i would go out and get a third party cooler b4 i over clock it... wudnt want to damage any parts..

 

[FAST6191]

3 types of overclocking graphics cards:
core
Up the speed of the GPU itself: more cycles the faster stuff gets done.
Temperature: above about 100-120 degrees Celsius semiconductors stop functioning as useful semiconductors (technical explanation: increasing temperature increases carrier concentration negating the functionality of the p-n junction which is the whole basis of a transistor and by extension the chip).
While that is the limit you do not want to be there as you will shorten your chips life quite a lot (electron migration is probably the main reason why chips fail and heat does not do it any favours)
You also want to account a bit for the fact the temperature at the sensor is most likely off from the chip internals but you are then playing a game as some apps guess at the chip internals (it is fairly basic thermodynamics).
As for fan speed it is more noise than anything although some have reliability on their mind (running a motor like is in your card full pelt is not nice compared to a lower setting)

memory Same theory as the first one but more speed here allows for quicker reading and writing of files to the ram. See any normal memory overclocking guide although I am not sure about upping the voltage.

BIOS hack
By and large the same GPU is used for all cards in a (sub)series but some ship with various processing pipelines disabled (for example if a company sees demand for cheaper cards: ship the good GPU with cheap card settings + the other cheap parts). Naturally with an appropriate hack you can unlock a few of these (it is unlikely you will get them all as cards with bad pipelines have those disabled and used for cheap cards as well).
I am afraid this is fairly in depth and card dependent, I have seen a few simple methods where you run an app and click yes a few times and I have seen hard ones involving flashing a chip directly. A newer card like yours is more likely to have the former available but read long, read hard and repeat. After all is said and done it is fairly safe (extra pipelines will kick out a few more degrees but nothing special) but getting there is not risk free (flashing a BIOS: screw it up and yeah, overclocking: crashing/too high temperature for your liking is fairly easy to correct).


All in all if you plan on overclocking a graphics card and have already done PCs and understand it go for it (it is in some regards easier), make sure air flow is good and serious consider some 3rd party stuff unless your card is geared for it: you have a factory overclocked card which is normally good for a little bit more but be careful and monitor it well (I personally have an overlay from my tweaking apps).

Oh yeah and omega drivers just updated their nvidia stuff:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/
I suggest you check them out.