Overclocking VRAM on GTX660 is it worth it, and is it safe?

[Akagi]

Hi guys, so I have a GTX660 Twin Frozr III which came pre overclocked from 1033MHz to 1137MHz on the core, and there isn't much movement there i'm afraid.

The memory however came clocked to 6000MHz. I am currently running MSI Kombuster with the memory overclocked to 6600MHz and it appears to be perfectly stable so far.

Will there be any noticeable increase in performance from this fairly sizable memory overclock?

I read this on another thread from another member:

everything the GPU does is stored / read from and written to the VRAM, by overclocking this memory you are making more bandwidth available to allow the GPU to operate at it's full capacity without waiting for the memory to store or feed it with data to manipulate

for each frame, data is read and written several times in several different ways so there is always the potential for the GPU to be waiting for the memory, just because it doesn't show up as a very clear bottleneck does not mean that it won't have any affect on frame rate or time taken to complete a particular frame

And the GTX660 has a narrow memory bus (192 bit), so from this I gather that it will increase performance by lessening the bottleneck from the memory bus?

I did consider flashing a modified ROM to my card to increase the voltage from 1.175v to 1.212v which should allow for me to overclock the core to 1250MHz+ but it would (I presume) invalidate my warranty, so I have decided against it.

 

[Rusty0611]

Hi guys, so I have a GTX660 Twin Frozr III which came pre overclocked from 1033MHz to 1137MHz on the core, and there isn't much movement there i'm afraid.

The memory however came clocked to 6000MHz. I am currently running MSI Kombuster with the memory overclocked to 6600MHz and it appears to be perfectly stable so far.

Will there be any noticeable increase in performance from this fairly sizable memory overclock?

I read this on another thread from another member:



And the GTX660 has a narrow memory bus (192 bit), so from this I gather that it will increase performance by lessening the bottleneck from the memory bus?

I did consider flashing a modified ROM to my card to increase the voltage from 1.175v to 1.212v which should allow for me to overclock the core to 1250MHz+ but it would (I presume) invalidate my warranty, so I have decided against it.

Hi there,

You're pretty much on the money on all points already. Overclocking will indeed remove/reduce the bottleneck effect on the memory... It won't harm it and you'll know when you've gone too far as it'll either crash or you'll get opaque triangles or something similar across your screen.

With regards to the voltage bios, personally I wouldn't bother but there's nothing stopping you flashing it back to default BIOS (by saving the old one before flashing).

 

[Akagi]

Thanks Rusty

My main concerns with the BIOS flashing are the possibility of bricking the card, and the possibility of the card dieing while it still has the modified ROM on it. Wouldn't the retailer/manufacturer be able to determine whether or not the card has the standard ROM even if it is dead?