X1950 Pro Overclocking - 680/1600

Today (12/04/08) I decided to give it a shot at overclocking my (new?) X1950 Pro

Yes, I know it's an old card and is less than half the speed of current high-end cards, but that doesn't mean that I cannot overclock it right? I'm just six months/a year behind, but I too need the experience.

So here I am, firing up ATT and doing some simply overclocking. I read on forums that this card maxes out at around 660+mhz, so I should hit around that speed too.

So, start with 630mhz. No problem. 640, no problemo. 645, np. 650, np.

Have to start to be careful here. 654? Ok. 658, nothing wrong. 662? Easy.

Seems like 660mhz is easy for my card. I think I'll leave it to the auto-find-max. But that was a mistake. Coz it immediately jumped to 668, then 675, then 682, where it rendered (to my amazement) for a little while before hanging and blacking out.

But, if it manages 682mhz for that little while, it might be able to do 680. That's a nice stopping point.

So I tried. Ran for quite a while now, max temperature reached. Scan for artifacts, no artifacts found.

Woot, looks like I got myself quite a good card.

And the temperatures of this card isn't bad too. While normally it does 45~50 idling depending on room temperature (usually 46) and ~61 degrees load, it rises sharply too 75 degrees at 680mhz. 75 is still considered ok and even low for high-end overclocked cards, but that's because the normal temps are too low to start with. And that's considering that my cooling sux.

Ok, maybe AC Accelero isn't anywhere near sux, but my case is. Those kind of minimalistic silent pc with only the PSU fan spinning.

Lets test my ram now.

Unfortunately, my ram wasn't exactly the best. I set it at 800mhz (1600mhz) since it's around what everybody's getting. The card works at 680/1600 for quite a while in UT3 before showing checkerboxing - sign of memory failing. It didn't hang.

The fact that it took some time (and my core was at 75 degrees, with the surrounding not too far behind) suggests that it failed due to heat. And that's totally understandable; due to the Accelero, most of the ram chips are covered by it with little exposure to airflow. Eventually I'll be modding that cooler with a bigger, quieter fan, and I'll make sure the ram get the extra cooling from the bigger fan.

So, current highest stable, lets say 650/1500 for now. It was totally stable since I gave it so much distance from the maximum of 680/1600, which is just going to go higher.

I sure got myself a damn good card. With 1.5yr warranty left to boot, so I'm totally not afraid to spoil it and get a newer card in exchange. :P

But of course, I'm not going to run it at such high speeds. Default or lower is enough for me. Since I love silence and my CPU/RAM is bottlenecking (but not by a lot) anyway.