GTX 260 worst overclocker ever?

[frythecpuofbender]

Am I doing something wrong?
I bought a POV GTX 260 with default clock at 576 Core, 1242 Shader, 999 MHz mem and even a slight overclock to e.g. 610 core seems to be pretty unstable.
Crysis MP often starts to give me yellowish polygons or streaks of triangles and then crashes to a black desktop, sometimes I get the NV4disp.dll error and I can recover to desktop after going through 640x480, 8-bit color.
I tried Mercenaries 2 with the Overclock techpowerup used (688 Core 1237 MHz Memory) with the same model and soon got the typical square artefacting with hang after a couple of mins.

Is there a trick how the values should correspond to each other and are otherwise unstable?

I'm now using the default values again but the card still feels somewhat shaky I dunno.
Temps shouldn't be an issue. I got my Quad watercooled pretty chilly and the card gets 76° in heavy Crysis gaming. I used 177.92 and now 177.98 dunno if I should go back some versions, cause the card seemed to work better with no crashes on 177.41.
Overall system stability is excellent, no mem erors, Prime95 runs flawlessly and professional apps work without crashing too.

Sometimes I know why more and more people switch over to the evil console world...all this tweaking just to get the game to not crash....

 

[angry hampster]

have you stress tested it? Use ATItool. That sounds like a bum card to me.

 

[videopho]

Welcome to the 260 o/c club.
No doubt it's a shittiest card I've ever bought in terms of o/c.
If you can still can return it, I'd recommend to do so.

 

[BFG10K]

Overclocking any device is running it outside of its rated spec and is never guaranteed, aside from factory overclocks of course.

I'm amazed so many people seem to think they?re entitled to attaining some level and if they don?t the device must have a ?problem?.

If the device runs stock perfectly but can?t even go 1 MHz higher, it?s still a perfectly functioning device.

 

[CottonRabbit]

Running fine 680/1200/1400 here on 177.92. The card OC's well in reviews too. I think it's your card.

 

[ginfest]

Originally posted by: CottonRabbit
Running fine 680/1200/1400 here on 177.92. The card OC's well in reviews too. I think it's your card.

What he said ^^^

I've run mine at 650/1100 from day 1 and never had a problem. It's not the highest OC I've read about on these cards, but suffices for my needs

 

[WelshBloke]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Overclocking any device is running it outside of its rated spec and is never guaranteed, aside from factory overclocks of course.

I'm amazed so many people seem to think they?re entitled to attaining some level and if they don?t the device must have a ?problem?.

If the device runs stock perfectly but can?t even go 1 MHz higher, it?s still a perfectly functioning device.

I absolutely agree, the problem is that so many people on forums use overclockability as a factor when pimping cards to other members.

 

[bdubyah]

yeah, mines set at 726/1250/1483.

might could go a little higher, but this works well for me. it's a plain eVGA stock card i got from their step-up.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Overclocking any device is running it outside of its rated spec and is never guaranteed, aside from factory overclocks of course.

The other thing about factory overclocks is... cards are now binned. So, the lucky stock card that is a great overclocker was probably not binned and sold that way to meet demands. However, the rest of the stock cards are ones that don't meet the factory overclocks. Nothing magical about it. Same thing Intel and AMD does with CPUs, and all the memory manufacturers do.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Overclocking any device is running it outside of its rated spec and is never guaranteed, aside from factory overclocks of course.

I'm amazed so many people seem to think they?re entitled to attaining some level and if they don?t the device must have a ?problem?.

If the device runs stock perfectly but can?t even go 1 MHz higher, it?s still a perfectly functioning device.

true that. I have had, or seen at a friend, items that OC like crazy, and items that are just crap...

My buddy once bought an 8800GTS 640 card that oced well beyond our wildest dreams, it outperformed the 8800Ultra and was still rock solid.
On the other hand, i once had a cpu that was supposedly great ocer that will not OC even 1 single measly percent!

remember that engineering sample phenom that was going beyond 3ghz? that was at the time where nobody could get them above 2.2 or 2.3 ghz...

 

[SunnyD]

Slightly off topic, my favorite are the folks over on FS/FT that demand a premium for a used part they claim "overclocks well" to a certain level. As always, it depends on a million factors, and just because you overclocked it doesn't mean I will. Better yet, you're charging someone more for a part that you've abused, voided the warranty on by running out of spec (in most cases), and more than likely shortened the life of.

 

[taltamir]

and yet, people will actually pay more for it
first rule of economics: "Something is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it"

 

[frythecpuofbender]

So now I went back to 177.41 drivers (177.98 had an annoying digital vibrance bug too) and at least Crysis MP seems to not have to stupid crashs anymore. Mercenaries still crashes randomly (card does not overheat while playing, 65° or something like it).
I 'm now back to stock settings. Dunno what I could do now, I once tried to exchange a card and the guy quickly tested it and denied there was a problem.
I hate PC gaming right now, too much fiddling and tweaking and patching. Nvidia and the publishers should get their act together asap.

 

[taltamir]

yea, go get an Xbox and deal with waiting weeks for a replacement xbox 360 cause of the red ring of death...
Or maybe a PS3 and have to deal with PS2 no longer working on it cause they dropped backwards support.
Or a wii with 2003 level graphics.

A PC is just plain superior. Mercenaries crashes, it was released how many DAYS ago? new games crash. Get used to it... they do so even on consules nowadays since the PS3 and Xbox 360 allow games to be patched via the internet. So the same untested crap is being pushed by bad companies. Be more weary of what you buy. 9/10 games are not finishable without a patch.

Anyways, you could always RMA the video card with the manufacturer.

 

[frythecpuofbender]

You're right of course *shame on me*.
I'd never touch a FPS on console ever
It's just so frustrating, when you have a topnotch system, every professional tool works fine and games keep doing stupid stuff. Sometimes you need to change the audio DX acceleration to off, sometimes you have to switch prerendered frames to 1 etc... just to get around the most annoying crash bugs. Game stability has NOT improved since every second game is "just" a XBOX360 port with some high res textures slapped onto it. I look at you Mass Effect and Vegas2 and shudder remembering how often those crashed.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: taltamir
On the other hand, i once had a cpu that was supposedly great ocer that will not OC even 1 single measly percent!

I had an Opteron 144 that barely would overclock to the low 2GHz range. People around here ripped me a new one and called me various things and questioned my abilities and such, disregarding the fact that I had two more Opteron 144 chips which hit near 3GHz on the exact same setup.

Originally posted by: frythecpuofbender
I hate PC gaming right now, too much fiddling and tweaking and patching.

Yeah, I hear you. Things have improved because most patching is automatic now, but sometimes things just don't work right. Last week I built some computers. One of them would not run UT3. Instant crash as soon as you click on it. It was fine with everything else, and indeed since machines were hardware-identical, all I did was one install and then cloned hard drives (changing keys afterwards). Odd.

Then again, my slim PS2 crashes out of a game (Jak). I found out that this game had compatibility issues with the slim PS2. Consoles aren't so perfect after all. :roll:

 

[frythecpuofbender]

Ok I now used ATITOOL to test maximum overclock and now it starts getting crazy:

Core is stable at 687Mhz (from 576)
Mem was tested until it reached 1282Mhz when the whole desktop halted (except the mouse cursor) and I had to reboot.
I don't know how ATITOOL handles shader clock? Can't test this, but is it safe to assume that shaders normally are linked to Core and can go as high as the core goes?

Now what??? ATITOOL tells me I could overclock this card a whole lot but games like Crysis or Mercenaries2 say no.
Could it be that the 192 shaders are in a way flawed on that card? Maybe that's causing the crashing sometimes?

 

[error8]

Originally posted by: frythecpuofbender
Ok I now used ATITOOL to test maximum overclock and now it starts getting crazy:

Core is stable at 687Mhz (from 576)
Mem was tested until it reached 1282Mhz when the whole desktop halted (except the mouse cursor) and I had to reboot.
I don't know how ATITOOL handles shader clock? Can't test this, but is it safe to assume that shaders normally are linked to Core and can go as high as the core goes?

Now what??? ATITOOL tells me I could overclock this card a whole lot but games like Crysis or Mercenaries2 say no.
Could it be that the 192 shaders are in a way flawed on that card? Maybe that's causing the crashing sometimes?

I don't know why are you using ATI tool to increase your clocks. Use Riva Tuner for that (shaders too) and let the tool do the "scan for artifacts" part.

Never take ATI tool artifact scanner as a the perfect program. Is you pass at least one hour with it without artifacts then your card is some 90% stable, but it's still not 100%. You have to use games to see if it is really stable.

For example my 8800 GT passed 266 minutes with ATI tool artifact test with the memory at 2200 mhz, but crashed in Mass Effect after 5 minutes.

 

[error8]

Originally posted by: error8

Originally posted by: frythecpuofbender
Ok I now used ATITOOL to test maximum overclock and now it starts getting crazy:

Core is stable at 687Mhz (from 576)
Mem was tested until it reached 1282Mhz when the whole desktop halted (except the mouse cursor) and I had to reboot.
I don't know how ATITOOL handles shader clock? Can't test this, but is it safe to assume that shaders normally are linked to Core and can go as high as the core goes?

Now what??? ATITOOL tells me I could overclock this card a whole lot but games like Crysis or Mercenaries2 say no.
Could it be that the 192 shaders are in a way flawed on that card? Maybe that's causing the crashing sometimes?

I don't know why are you using ATI tool to increase your clocks. Use Riva Tuner for that (shaders too) and let the tool do the "scan for artifacts" part.

Never take ATI tool artifact scanner as a the perfect program. If you pass at least one hour with it without artifacts then your card is some 90% stable, but it's still not 100%. You have to use games to see if it is really stable.

For example my 8800 GT passed 266 minutes with ATI tool artifact test with the memory at 2200 mhz, but crashed in Mass Effect after 5 minutes.