Best or automatic method to discover the highest gfx overclock?

[Stonedofmoo]

I've got a Asus GF8800GT which has been running at 650/1900 for a few months with no trouble at all
Today I decided to push it a little more and now its at 675,1950 and appears to still be running fine.

I have no idea how far I could or should push it. I don't have much experience with these modern cards, but on my old ones the Nvidia driver itself automatically determined the best overclock speed.

Is there a utility out there that does this now or do I have to manually raise the clocks until I see artifacts in my games?
Cheers

 

[Helios1234]

Atitool should do the trick, it has an artifacting test plus it can overclock your card automatically until artifacts start appearing in the 3d test.

http://www.techpowerup.com/atitool/

 

[Stonedofmoo]

Actually I was just trying that and it doesn't seem to work

I suspect it's because I run Vista x64, but I did try disabling driver signing just to be sure. no joy as of yet.

Might have to do this manually

 

[Rackerz]

Go up 10Mhz each time on the core until it freezes or artifacts.

 

[Leebone]

Actually I was just trying that and it doesn't seem to work

I suspect it's because I run Vista x64, but I did try disabling driver signing just to be sure. no joy as of yet.

Might have to do this manually

Are you using the latest version?

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Video-Tweak/ATITool.shtml

 

[Stonedofmoo]

Yes I am

Still I've done it manually running looping 3DMark and found it's 100% stable up to 720core and 2040 memory.
However for 24/7 running I shall leave it at 700/2000 memory so I don't over do it

 

[Dyson]

Might have to do this manually

Why not? Takes time, but thats the fun!

Wouldn't trust a program to find a max o/clock personally.

 

[Rroff]

There doesn't seem to be much performance gain above 700 on the core - partly it seems due to being memory bandwidth limited and I don't really advise running at 2000 or above - I'm not sure if that stuff about the memory interface not liking 2000+ is a myth or not but it certainly doesn't seem to like speeds above 2000.

If you know what you are doing you can use nBitor to reflash the GPU's BIOS to gain an extra +0.05volts on the core which gives you another 20-50MHz on the core - but again unless you go over 2000MHz on the RAM or it lets you get a significantly higher shader clock it doesn't really give you that much extra.

Most 8800GT will hit between 720 and 740 stable without modification.

I usually use ATITool to give me an idea where the upper limit is - then fine tune it by hand.

 

[Stonedofmoo]

It really is a bargain for that. I bought the bog standard Asus 8800GT and to go from 600 core to 700 for no extra cash seems ace
And it's the later one with the dual slot cooler so theres no extra noise either. I'm really glad I bought it.

I won't bother running its top speed which was 726Mhz core as I don't want to stress it. 700 is a healthy overclock I reckon