I overclocked my ASUS GeForce 6600 from 300/550mhz (core/memory respectively) to 345/642, since that's what the "Detect Optimal Frequencies" button came up with. Keep in mind that I'm running this card on a 250W power supply. Should I worry about ruining the card or anything? I just got Oblivion today, and it runs noticably better at the new speeds. As you guys may know, I'm not exactly the most knowledgable person on this sort of thing. I don't normally overclock anything, but this is only until I start building my computer. Any advice on this matter is appreciated.
Do you have active or passive cooling? Meaning, does your video card have a fan? If not, i'd get a fan pronto. Overall, overclocking will decrease the life of your vid card, but at the rate you need to upgrade these damn things, it really shouldn't matter. If you're running the card at the edge of it's tollerance you might kill the card in short order, but if you don't bump the overclock too high you'll probably be ok. Warning signs if you've set the clock too high are: - Graphical glitches - White borders around 3d objects (or any border for that matter) - "Square patterns" distorting the view in 3d games - Pc locking up - PC rebooting - Physics issues in the games (sometimes the physics are tied in to the clock setting for the graphics, depends on the game engine) - Any other weird issues. If your system starts acting weird, i'd set it back to normal. And i would never run Doom 3 on an overclocked video card.
It's got a fan. The settings were determined by the software, which I assumes sets the speeds at a safe level. I don't want to kill the card, but I don't mind shortening the life too much, either. After about an hour of playing, I've noticed nothing out of the ordinary with the game, other than it running smoother. Out of curiousity, why not run Doom 3 with an overclocked card? I never finished the game, and I may want to play it sooner or later.
Doom 3 runs pretty close to the hardware and skips a lot of the directX calls. It bases a lot of it's calculations off of the reported speed of the video card, a lot of the other parts to the engine work off of the timing of the graphics thread. Overclocking the video card while running Doom3 can have unpredictable results.
Doom 3 Doom 3 used Open GL last time I checked so it pretty much has nothing to do with Driect X. Doom 3 should also run ok providied that is a stable overclock. I would definitely get rid of that power supply ASAP because 250w is pretty low and I'm guessing it probably isn't a decent quality one either.
Hah, so much for that. I started getting crazy amounts of artifacts in Oblivion, so I just turned it back down. I started work today, though, so hopefully some money will start rolling in for a new computer.
