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Overclocked Graphics Cards

godinman

godinman

godinman

Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2007
Posts
8,578
Just a quicky, If I was to buy a cheap GTX 260 (ie not overclocked), would I be able to clock it to similar levels as its more expensive counterparts?

For example:

BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC MAXCORE 896MB GDDR3

- Core Clock: 590MHz
- Shader Clock: 1296MHz
- Memory Data Rate: 1998MHz

£189.99 ex VAT
£223.24 inc VAT

BFG GeForce GTX 260 OCX MAXCORE 896MB GDDR3

- Core Clock: 655MHz
- Shader Clock: 1404MHz
- Memory Data Rate: 2250MHz

£219.99 ex VAT
£258.49 inc VAT

Would the top card be able to clock to similar levels as the bottom one?

And would it be advisable to get the cheap one, and then with the 'saved' money (plus £5) get one of these:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...V1000 Quad Heatpipe Extreme Gaming VGA Cooler

And if I did would it enable me to clock the cheaper card to higher levels than the more expensive ones?

Sorry if this is garbled, tis a sunday morning after all...

Thanks for any help
 
The more expensive ones are guaranteed to run at the overclocked speeds, however the maximum overclock will most likely be exactly the same as the cheaper one.

My advice: never buy pre-overclocked cards unless they come with some other kind of benefit (3850 Asus TOP series had .8ns DDR3, 4870 Powercolor PCS series have 4 phase power....etc) As far as current nvidia cards go, I don't think there are any such benefits.
 
I would say yes, the current 280/260 both seem to overclock quite well, a standard clocked card i'd say you'd have to be very unlucky not to be able to exceed the clocks on a factory OC one

Beware noise though, i overclocked my gtx 280 to 700/1275/1475 but it was too noisey and the increase in FPS was barely noticable, i went back to stock, but i will probably do a factory level OC, I'E similar to what you get on your OC BFG's, EVGA's etc of 650/1200/1400, with a lower fan speed which should keep the noise at a level that's around that of my case fans rather than being much noiser.

As the above poster says unless your getting better hardware, you can save yourself £££ by simply downloading nvidia tools, from Nvidia's website and setting the clocks at the same level as the BFG one and upping the fan speed
 
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...V1000 Quad Heatpipe Extreme Gaming VGA Cooler

Okay, think i'll prob end up getting the cheapest gtx 260 (with extra stream procs), and one of the coolers above.

Rather than starting a new thread i'll ask this now. Does anyone know about this Nvidia thing allowing you to use a graphics cards as a processor?

At the moment the only thing that stretches my quad on all cores is video encoding. So if I swapped to a dual, which should clock higher, and be better more most other things, would I get good results using the GTX 260 for encoding video?

Hope that makes sense and thanks for your help
 
I have the BFG OC MAXCORE and it easily overclocks well past the OCX's stock - tho both cards would probably OC to about the same when maxed out...

They are also pretty quiet and cool running cards.
 
godinman said:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...V1000 Quad Heatpipe Extreme Gaming VGA Cooler

Okay, think i'll prob end up getting the cheapest gtx 260 (with extra stream procs), and one of the coolers above.

Rather than starting a new thread i'll ask this now. Does anyone know about this Nvidia thing allowing you to use a graphics cards as a processor?

At the moment the only thing that stretches my quad on all cores is video encoding. So if I swapped to a dual, which should clock higher, and be better more most other things, would I get good results using the GTX 260 for encoding video?

Hope that makes sense and thanks for your help
Click to expand...

There are no aftermarket coolers available for the 260/280s AFAIK.

I think you're referring to the Baddaboom video encoder that nVidia now supports via PhysX/GPGPU. I'm not sure how effective it is though. And I wouldn't bother swapping CPU.
 
Hi thanks for the replies:D

My mates buying my pc off me, so will be getting all new stuff anyway so will prob be going dual...

Any idea if this Baddaboom video encoder would work on my 8800 gtx? Just for a test..
 
Have downloaded and had a bit of a play. Looks like you can only rip dvd's to mp4?

I was kinda hoping you could just set an applications affinity to the gpu...Spose thats asking too much!

Anyone know what sort of things you can do with the new drivers with regards to video encoding? Specifically .avi to dvd..

Cheers:D
 
reflux said:
There are no aftermarket coolers available for the 260/280s AFAIK.

I think you're referring to the Baddaboom video encoder that nVidia now supports via PhysX/GPGPU. I'm not sure how effective it is though. And I wouldn't bother swapping CPU.
Click to expand...

bringing out the thermalright HR-03-GTX soon
 
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