fsquad: OCed ram really kills video card?

Aboroth

Senior member
Feb 16, 2000
723
0
0
I've never fried my video card RAM before, but thats because I have always been conservative overclocking and haven't ever gotten a significant increase in performance to justify the risk of my card going bad. In fact, currently I have no video cards overclocked (but every CPU I have is).
 

Plester

Diamond Member
Nov 12, 1999
3,165
0
76
not in my experience. i've overclocked every video card i could - and never had any of them degrade, or not clock as high over time. starting w/ tnt2, i put heatsinks on my ram - made a big difference. it doesn't make any difference on a Gladiac however. (i am very sceptical of posts where people claim 'before i put on ramsinks i could only get 370, now i can get it to 4xx' - hmmm, i call bs.)

find the limit of your card's mem (no need to o'c a gts core) and then back it off a bit, eg. my gladiac will run at 388 without artifacts, but gets pretty warm in summer, so i back it off to 380 for safety, when winter rolls around i'll get back on it. also it's a good idea to have good cooling (make a card cooler w/ a 80mm fan=cheap and effective).

with the current generation of cards, boosting mem speeds makes a big difference. you may reduce the effective life of the cards memory from 10 years to 5 years, but i for one have never held onto the same card for much more than a year or so.
 

Tonec

Golden Member
Feb 29, 2000
1,505
0
0
Never had a problem with my v3's crappy -7 memory. Run it 26mhz over spec.
 

tonyou

Senior member
Nov 22, 1999
508
0
0
That article described perfectly what happened to me last year with one Voodoo3 3000 AGP that I had. Worked fine at first, then I overclocked it in steps until it wouldn't go anymore (~190MHz). Eventually I settled down to 183MHz and everything seems to be fine except the next day when I played Unreal I noticed some dots started to appear on the screen. That's when it went from bad to worse, the dots increased in numbers, so I slowed the card down in steps hopping that they would go away, but it was too late... By the time I dropped the speed down to 120MHz, which is way below the default speed, 3d games were looking like TV screens with bad reception.

I got another Voodoo3 3000 AGP and pushed it up again to as high as 200MHz(wouldn't work) and eventually settled down at 183MHz. This one lasted a whole year without any problems at that speed.

I guess it all depends on your luck? Both card had identical speed Hyundai RAMs

Tony