(Card is a Leadtek 6600)
What's the best way to test a video card overclock? I just did some preliminary testing which the nvidia "tester" doesn't seem to work properly. It'll let me set the clock speed up till the system hangs. I first tested the core speed, it went upto 550 (in 50mhz increments); crashed at 600. I decided to set it at 500 (GT stock spd) at least for this initial round of testing. Near as I can tell based on these results is that 6600 and 6600GT chips are literallly the same, just clocked differently at stock.
Memory was a different issue as I knew that this was DDR not GDDR3 so I'd never make it near GT values. I went up in 50MHz increments till the computer crashed again (again nvidia tester didn't give me anything). It crashed at 800; I clocked it down to 750 and ran into some minor graphical artifacts in World of Warcraft (windowed mode maximized to 1280x1024), so I ramped it down to 725 and played for about 15 minutes with no visible problems.
Since we seemed stable at 500/725 I decided to run the CS:S stress test and came out with 101 FPS at 1024x768 noAA/AF. A test conducted in the past (I know I should have probably done them right after another to reduce variables) was 79 fps so that's a little over a 25% increase.
I think I'm probably at or a little over the limit for the memory at 725 seeing as 750 caused minor graphical artifacts. Tomorrow I'm going to see just how high the core can go. It didn't crash windows at 550 but that's no guarantee it'll run that speed.
I'm not too worried about the cooling on the GPU chip as its the same cooler that they use on their 6600GT (or at least looks the same). As far as memory goes it doesn't have any heatsinks (but does get a breeze from the GPU fan) so should I clock that down further to prevent overheating?
Anything else you guys can think of that I should know would be useful too. Thank you.
EDIT: One more thing. There's no Temprature Settings available in the Nvidia control pannel. Does the Leadtek 6600 not come with a temprature monitor or is it somehow disabled?
What's the best way to test a video card overclock? I just did some preliminary testing which the nvidia "tester" doesn't seem to work properly. It'll let me set the clock speed up till the system hangs. I first tested the core speed, it went upto 550 (in 50mhz increments); crashed at 600. I decided to set it at 500 (GT stock spd) at least for this initial round of testing. Near as I can tell based on these results is that 6600 and 6600GT chips are literallly the same, just clocked differently at stock.
Memory was a different issue as I knew that this was DDR not GDDR3 so I'd never make it near GT values. I went up in 50MHz increments till the computer crashed again (again nvidia tester didn't give me anything). It crashed at 800; I clocked it down to 750 and ran into some minor graphical artifacts in World of Warcraft (windowed mode maximized to 1280x1024), so I ramped it down to 725 and played for about 15 minutes with no visible problems.
Since we seemed stable at 500/725 I decided to run the CS:S stress test and came out with 101 FPS at 1024x768 noAA/AF. A test conducted in the past (I know I should have probably done them right after another to reduce variables) was 79 fps so that's a little over a 25% increase.
I think I'm probably at or a little over the limit for the memory at 725 seeing as 750 caused minor graphical artifacts. Tomorrow I'm going to see just how high the core can go. It didn't crash windows at 550 but that's no guarantee it'll run that speed.
I'm not too worried about the cooling on the GPU chip as its the same cooler that they use on their 6600GT (or at least looks the same). As far as memory goes it doesn't have any heatsinks (but does get a breeze from the GPU fan) so should I clock that down further to prevent overheating?
Anything else you guys can think of that I should know would be useful too. Thank you.
EDIT: One more thing. There's no Temprature Settings available in the Nvidia control pannel. Does the Leadtek 6600 not come with a temprature monitor or is it somehow disabled?
