What are 'safe' OC thresholds?

[Crimzon]

I haven't OC'd my video card yet, but I was wondering what the 'safe' limits would be. I've looked at a couple sites, and most were saying 10% would be reasonable. I have checked a few other threads, but some people seem to do more than 15% so I was curious. Thanks.

 

[Jeff7]

It depends on your cooling. In my experience, a videocard will display visual glitches, or artifacts, if it's overclocked too far. That, or it'll just freeze the system. What videocard do you have? Do you know what your case temperature is?
Luck in overclocking videocards varies according to brand, stock speeds, and the hardware itself. Sometimes the stock speed is very close to the limits of the hardware, thus it can't be overclocked far. Others, like the Albatron GF4 Ti4200 card, I think they are set to 555 effective memory speed, and some have been OC'd to 720 if I remember right. But when overclocking, the maximum speed is limited by the weakest component on the board. If you have just one finicky memory chip that can only handle 10MHz extra, that's the limit.

 

[Crimzon]

Heh, yeah, which one I had would probably help. It's the Geforce4 MX 420. Even though I looked at the comparasins with the faster MX's and the Ti's I didn't realize how much of a memory bottleneck there was on this. So I want to see if I can boost it for a while.

 

[ctk1981]

Well, Im in the middle of testing the OC abilities of my PNY GeForce Ti500. Right now, with stock cooling and the side fan NOT hooked up I can hit 260mhz/530mhz. The core wont put out much more, but I did try a quick run with 550mhz memory and it worked. Later on I think im gonna apply some Artic Alumina and hook up the side case fan and see if I can gain anymore.

High score on 3dmark2001 with the OC: 9543. After I get everything all setup and squared away I'll run a UT2003 benchmark.

 

[mastay]

Overclock slowly until you first see artifacts. Then back up a couple of mhz. Also, 3Dmarks tend to crash a lot when you are over the limit, so you can kind of rely on that too.

 

[Crimzon]

Ah ok. What exactly are 'artifacts' ? Things not displayed properly?

With the Dell 4550 system a lot of people bought (P4 2.4 533, 128 333) and my video card, I was getting 4091~ with the 40.41 drivers on 3DMark2001SE. The 40.72 drivers were around the same range 4070. I used coolbits to step it up from 250/332 (stock) to 275/366. I don't think there are any fans on the OEM Geforce4 though. Now 3DMark is doing about 4459. Is the overclocking worth it?

 

[ctk1981]

The first time you see artifacts you will know exactly what everyone is talking about. Basically, they are weird blips, blotches, etc on the screen that sometimes dont go away until you clock down a bit or restart even.

A good way to check your progress is 3dmark 2000. 3dmark 2000 is better at detecting system stability/video card stability rather than 2001.