Geforce 4 overclocking and superior cooling?

[Mullzy]

I've played with O/C'ing my Geforce4 with OK results. My question is about what effect, if any, does cooling has on the limit of the card. When finding the limit of my Asus Ti4200 I just kept bumping up the memory and core speeds until I started to notice little black dots one one of my game demos. These effects were noticed immediately -- not after stress testing for a while. Bump the slider up a notch to see the black dots... move it down a notch to remove them. I can play a game for hours with my setting one notch below this limit and never have any problems.

So my question is: Does superior cooling allow you to reach higher speeds? Or does it just make the speeds you are able to reach safer to opperate at? Does my limit have very little to do with cooling and very much to do with the design limits of the memory/gpu?

The reason I ask is because my 3 week old Asus card's fan just bit the dust and I don't want to wait for the 3 week turn-around warranty fix. I'm just going to throw a Thermal Take GF4 cooler on it and was wondering if the ram and gpu cooling might allow me to reach a higher o/c.

FYI, if memory serves I can get it to 280/545 with stock cooling. (it has the older, slower ram)

Thanks!

 

[shock311]

From what I've read the cards vary with overclocking potential, i'm sure another cooler might help some but not much. My MSI 4200 128mb card can overclock to 594/300, which got me over 13000 hill on 3Dmark. If you can, trade your card in and get an MSI, its a great card.

 

[pelikan]

I put a cpu cooler on my Ti4600 and got 20MHz more from the core and 40MHz more from the memory.

 

[4x4expy]

I have the Thermaltake G4 cooler on my Ti4400(PNY), and I run it 24/7 at 320/640 without a problem. I have run it as high as 328/660 in the past, and it would do fine for a day or so and then would lock up. I cut back to the 320/640 settings, and forgot about it. The only thing with the cooler is that the RAM heatsinks included are trash. I plan to pick up some quality RAMsinks later.

 

[Conky]

Cooling helps but the inherent ability of the card and it's parts come into play. I have a MSI GF4-4400 that runs at over 4600 settings with no artifacts and no special cooling. My brother bought a "special edition" MSI GF4-4400 that showed artifacting at any speed over stock.

It's really luck of the draw. And be careful if you don't have a backup videocard... you can burn these things out although usually you can reset them to lower speeds if you have problems.

Also, it always helps in any overclocking to remove the cover on your case. I don't know if I could even find the side of my case.

 

[LesPaul]

If you get better temps with the side of your case off, then you have poor case airflow. Your case temps should actually be lower (if you have good airflow) with the side on. This is actually an easy way to tell if you have good airflow in your case... pull off the side and if the temps stay about the same or get higher, you have pretty good case flow. If your temps get significantly cooler, than you definately have poor case flow.
You might want to invest in some more case fans and round IDE cables (or position your flat cables along the sides, so they aren't obstructing the airflow), or maybe even some fan ducts that direct the airflow off the fans better.

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: LesPaul
If you get better temps with the side of your case off, then you have poor case airflow. Your case temps should actually be lower (if you have good airflow) with the side on. This is actually an easy way to tell if you have good airflow in your case... pull off the side and if the temps stay about the same or get higher, you have pretty good case flow. If your temps get significantly cooler, than you definately have poor case flow.
You might want to invest in some more case fans and round IDE cables (or position your flat cables along the sides, so they aren't obstructing the airflow), or maybe even some fan ducts that direct the airflow off the fans better.

There is no way it can be cooler inside a standard computer case than room temperature.

 

[LesPaul]

I know that, but its the airflow over components that keeps things cool, by carrying off the heat. If you remove the case side, it generally hurts your case airflow. That is, unless you have crappy airflow to start with.

 

[Chrisdragon]

I'm using stock cooling on my PNY GF4 ti4200 64mb and the speeds are left at 275/551 (from 250/513). I think the 92mm stealth fan that's taped to the bottom of the case is helping out a little bit since it's blowing in the gf4's direction.

 

[KillaBong]

Mine gets to 325/730 no problem, but past that it locks up due to heat. I have never had artifacts, but from what I understand they mean your card is limited by more than heat. I may also get better cooling for my card, because right now it only has a terrible stock heatsink and bare ram. Hopefully if I bother upping the cooling quality, I will get 16-17k in 3dmark.

 

[maluckey]

My Ti-4200 is at 324/610 all day long, for six months. I am using afermarket ramsinks, and a ThermalTake copper cooler. Before, 317/599 was max before problems kicked in.

 

[mrman3k]

Luckily for me, in the window of my case, right above the graphics card there is a fan that blows right onto the graphics card, so it is always cooled.

I wanted to know is I were to put Tweakmonster RAMsinks on the card, could I still put that Zalman cooler? My graphics card is an MSI TI4400 by the way.

 

[Daysleeper]

my asus geforce4 ti-4400 goes up to 330/660 through 3dmark2001/2003 with the original cooling....well i think about testing watercooling but hell...the summer is coming here in Finland so i will wait until the spring and think about it then.......