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8500 512mb GT

allergate

allergate

allergate

Associate
Joined
2 Jun 2004
Posts
56
I seem to have made a mistake buying this card, unfortunately I got it without really researching it and didnt see the reply to my questions about buying it until after I had, (I know Im a pleb!) so my question is this? Can anyone give me advice on overclocking the hell out of it?

Ive never oc'd a graphics card before, I have only just started with my cpu the other week.

This is what I have and their current settings:

Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 oc'd to 3GHZ with 1.4vcore and EVO120 Cooler
Kingston Value Ram DDR 800 (havent overclocked it yet current settings are:
5-6-6-18-24 command rate 2T, these values are from CPU-Z)
Foxconn 8500GT 512MB
DFI Lanparty ICFX3200-T2R/G

Any help would be most appreciated :)

Cheers
 
Why dont you just send it back and swap it for something else? Or if you can't do that then eBay it and use the money to buy something better.

Although if you are going to overclock I recommend coolbits 2 as it unlocks overclocking from the Nvidia Control panel :)
 
I would send it back but I bought it trade ex vat from work so I can't really without causing a real stink.

I am looking to buy a 8800gts or something similar next month if can afford it (got a nice commission coming through :D )

In the mean time how far do you think I can push this 8500gt puppy?

I have downloaded ntune and the stock core bus is at 459mhz and memory bus is at 400 mhz. How far do you think you can go above these?

My current 3Dmark06 score with my setup is 2769 which isnt very good by the look of other peoples scores.
 
I guess it depends on the memory on the card etc. If you use something like coolbits, you can use the auto clock function and that will increase the clocks until it finds the maximum stable clock (although u still might beable to push it a little higher)

Google is always a good place to start, try and find out how far other people have pushed your card :)
 
My sample overclocked from 459 to 730 (~60% OC) on the core completely stable on stock air cooling with no volt mods which gave it a nice performance boost in games...

The memory however didn't like to be overclocked at all... but as yours has different memory it might overclock better...

Heres the highest 3D Marks 06 I got out of it...

http://service.futuremark.com/orb/projectdetails.jsp?projectType=14&projectId=2402000 (3185)
 
Thats pretty good and not far off what a dx9 card would get at the same price level. Does the ddr2 memory stop it being overclocked I wonder, I read they'd be great cards but are throttled by the 128bit bus
 
Yeah the crud DDR2 memory really holds the cards back - I could overclock the memory quite a bit ~25% and get a nice boost in performance - but it would randomly lockup if I had the memory over 432 (400 stock)... and even then it would crash immediatly on starting ETQW with anything other than stock memory clocks, I think most of the chips were good for 500MHz but atleast one was barely good enough for stock...

The shader clock seemed to be the thing holding the core back tho... the moment it went over 1500MHz (which was about 745MHz on the core IIRC) stability went out the window - but in older games I could quite happily push the core well into the 800MHz region.
 
Sounds like you've done your homework.
I spotted you got a 4 disk raid0 there :eek: Have you posted a hdtune graph to the thread in the hard disks forum perchance?
 
Don't think I posted with 4 discs - I believe I posted results with 3 discs at some point on here... on this gigabyte P35 board I'm using now (sig is out of date) it doesn't get the best of performance - on my old DFI Infinity 975X it would get over 240MB/s average and 500+ burst, on this P35 board its only about 200MB/s average and 250 burst :S
 
well I'm gutted - that burst speed really seems to make a difference - more even than the average transfer rate... for the stuff I do.
 
Well try posting a graph and asking opinions, I wouldnt know really except if its something obvious like enabling sata2 or ncq :o

And do the test I posted there, no one else has :(
 
I finally got round to clocking this card and I think its made a canny difference.

At stock settings Core Mhz 459 and Memory 400 it gives a 3dmark06 score of 2880 with my E4400 @ 3.0ghz.

With a bit of tweaking using ntune with the core at 500 and the memory at 466 I get a 3d mark 06 score of 3230. Is that anygood? If I push the core and memory anymore I start getting light white boxes flikering during the benchmarks.
I do plan on changing my card soon, but I just wanted to push this as much as possible.
 
I'd flog it and get a couple of 2600XT's running in X-Fire mode. The overclock is not that bad, real world improvement will be far less than you imagine though.
 
I noticed this card is being shipped with Medion PC's that are sold by that large supermarket company at the moment.
 
I finally replaced the 8500GT 512mb. I bought myself a Club 3D 320mb 8800GTS today! :) Wow what a card! I have popped everything on full and everything has improved so drastically its amazing. I wish I had got this card sooner :)
 
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