Geforce 6800

Any body who has a 6800, and has overclocked with stock cooling; What are your core and memory speeds that run stable and realatively cool?

I got my to 400 core, 790 mem with no artifacts, but it runs a little too hot for comfort.

Have you unlocked your additional pixel pipelines? I got a 6800
recently but haven't bothered with any unlocking or overclocking yet.
Debating whether or not its worth the risk just now. I've overclocked
cards in the past so probably will again at some point.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

I am not an avid gamer, but I do own a few... hundred. Mostly older ones but I do have Unreal 2 and HL2 and a few other titles new.

My question: I have a 9800 pro 256 meg card. It runs all the setting at maximum. Why would anyone want to risk ruining their card? You cannot get more visual than maximum.

I have looked at the procedure on numerous occasions but never read a single word that would compel me to attempt an overclock.

That said, I do have powerstrip running full time. It is a utility to set my videocard on the fly, but have had no need to use it yet.

I am assuming that this conversation is about hardware overclocking, not software, right?

Anyway, this topic being about a 6800, a card many times better than my 9800, why would anyone want to chance it. It has got to be running better than mine and as I said, mine is at maximum.

You are not telling me that there are games more intensive than Doom III? A game I also ran at max.

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There is no history until something happens, then there is.

I dunno what framerate you are happy with, but my 6800 won't play many
new games at full settings and still be smooth. I've got Battlefield 2
setup as medium across the board and its now lovely and smooth, but
with everything maxed out (though still only 1024x768 resolution) it
was pretty jerky.

Fact is though, most people don't really overclock for the performance
gains, but more for the thrill of knowing they are getting the most out
of their hardware. I enjoy the process of overclocking more than the
end result.

The "unlocking" I mention is quite a significant move however. The 6800
is essentially just a 6800GT with less memory, lower clock speeds, and
less pixel pipelines. While no amount of modding is going to increase
your amount of memory, the other two can be improved to GT levels.
Overclocking is obviously going to be putting additional strain on the
hardware, raising temperatures and potentially damaging or shortening
the life of the card. Unlocking however is just the process of turning
on the pixel pipelines that have been turned off. It's not causing any
more work on components (other than these pipelines of course) so it
isn't going to hurt your card, but it does increase performance,
apparently by about 10% in the tests I've seen, and by even more in
some games. Together with overclocking the card its possible to push an
extra 10 or so FPS out of a lot of games which is certainly noticeable.
The risk is that these pipelines might be faulty, so if that is the
case then turning them on might cause problems. Every article I've read
has said that as it is a software mod, if you have issues then you can
simply turn off the pipelines again, but until I'm really struggling
with framerates in some games I'm content with how it runs.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Fact is though, most people don't really overclock for the performance
gains, but more for the thrill of knowing they are getting the most out
of their hardware. I enjoy the process of overclocking more than the
end result.

Agreed, I managed to overclock my processor (Athlon 64 3000+ venice)
from 1,8gh to 2,7ghz stable which was about 30% real perfomance gain.

Although i didnt even notice any actual difference at all =P.

So i clocked it back to its default settings..

When i get tired of my computer ill probably overclock it again and it
will probably die after a few months and then ill buy a dualcore
instead =P.

ReNo said:
I dunno what framerate you are happy with, but my 6800 won't play many new games at full settings and still be smooth. I've got Battlefield 2 setup as medium across the board and its now lovely and smooth, but with everything maxed out (though still only 1024x768 resolution) it was pretty jerky.

The newest games are the ones I mentioned. Doom III, HL2, U2 and UT2003.

Of the 4, Doom 3 gave me the most trouble but still ran fine.

1024x768 is my usual setting preference. I have not noticed any visual beauty boost by increasing the resolution beyond that.

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There is no history until something happens, then there is.

Doom 3 and Source engine stuff are the only 2 engines you mention that
are likely to have settings that could at all trouble a 6800 (Unreal
engine 2 that U2 and UT2003/4 run on is pretty old now), but remember
that its not only current games you've got to worry about. Already,
FEAR is said to be pushing cards harder than Doom 3's engine does, then
there is Stalker coming out sometime early next year, and no doubt
plenty of others on the horizon behind it.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

I think in the end I would rather buy a bigger card than push one beyond its specs. That way I have 2 fully functional cards instead of a broken one and the new one I had to buy.

I can always use the older card for another PC. If its burned out its not doing anyone any good.

I trust that you enjoy it and all, but still its not motivation enough for me. My money is way to hard to come by.

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There is no history until something happens, then there is.

I like how everyone says "doom 3 pushes cards" like it's making things that much better. All it is, is uncompressed textures. Has nothing to do with the SPEED of the card, but the amount of memory it has. The reason why that slows down is, obviously, the card doesn't have 512MB of ram, it has half, so it will use part of the aperture size. If that isn't 256MB it'll get even SLOWER, because it will begin using the page file. Of course, this effects the system BUS ... which in turn has a larger effect on FPS than anything else. (The shader effects are done pretty well on all cards back to the GF3-era)

Just some insight, I guess.

Games like BF2 and FEAR are the ones that require higher spec cards and speed. Since they use newer features.

Overclocking is for the experience and knowledge of overclocking: bragging rights. As most people has said here, there is no performance gain. I think some of the newer cards, because they're actually made to clock higher, give some better performances. But it's still not stable ... otherwise that card would have shipped at that speed ...

I saw some stuff on SLi cards getting overclocked and being stable and showing usable speedups. But, they were also dynamically overclocked, so most of the time they'd be at default speeds. I believe they only get overclocked (automatically) if the card needs to be sped up. And it stops once it reaches an internally set "safe" limit. At least, that's how I imagine that works.

But as I said earlier... bragging rights. Which is a pretty stupid reason to violate a very valuable warranty in case something else happens to the card.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I unlocked the pipelines, but there was a reason they were locked as with most 6800's. Running at stock speeds, I got a few artifacts in 3dmark05, but none in HL2, CS:s stress test, or BF2; so im not sure if i will keep those unlcoked.

As for performance, My stock 6800 with no unlock gets 3490 3dmarks05, and 94.8 FPS on CS:S stress test. My 6800 on 400/790, and no unlock gets 4113 3dmarks05 and 104.6 FPS on the stress test. I still have to try bench marking stock and OC'ed with unlocks.

And about dynamic over clocking, I know you can set it to be over clocked only when using 3d applications, so in regular windows there is no over clock, except for the memory, which cannot be dynamic.