The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

CK, I do I run it at 50 percent. That's about the best I can do without the noise becoming noticeable. It drops the temp about 10C, but I have a 3850 not 70, so it might be different for you.

EDIT: You guys think I shoudl take the cooler apart and put some AS5 on it? I don't want to mess with it right now as some guy wants to come see it, and hopefully it buy it, tomorrow.

 

yeh i think the main reason my case is a bit hotter than i like is the nzxt case fans, going to bung a sythe or an artic cooling 12 cm fan on the back, just for a little more flow lol, the nzxt fans are nice and quiet but at the 1000 rpm they run at they simply dont move any noticable amount of air, still my processor only reaches 45ºc maxed out with a freezer 64 on it so its not that bad, but not all of the heat from the 3870 leaves via the cooler the copper memory sinks get very hot, so i think with a little bit more airflow it should help the system in general. still its only a budget system so im happy with it for now, until i get the crossfire board and extra 3870 lol

no dont remove the cooler, theyre not bad and I dont think youll gain that much as they run so hot anyway, 1ºc - 2ºc drop isnt worth the application time. I notice the noise at much lower speeds, about 35% but then again thats in a room with no distractions. overall though the coolers work well, I cant see myself getting a third party one to replace the stock one any time soon.

 

Ok, here are the screens you were looking for...

CPU Benches:
http://img300.imageshack.us/my.php?image=benchcpupf7.jpg

http://img214.imageshack.us/my.php?image=processorarithmeticta1.png

Memory Benches:
http://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=memorybandwidthft6.png

http://img214.imageshack.us/my.php?image=memorybenchaa8.jpg

 

Kinda off topic, but why the hell do you have AOL? lol

Also try getting the Zune theme, it's easier on the eyes and it doesn't use more resources than what you already have.

 

I bought the gigabyte version of the 3850 which has a Zalman cooler on it. Cant tell you how loud or not it is as i still don't have all the parts for my build yet. But by the looks of it shouldn't be too bad. Working on a poor mans budget..

 

abuzar you talking about me?

EDIT: That's AIM by the way, AOL sucks.

 

It's hard to tell without knowing his timings and dvider. But as mentioned, yes, more bandwidth is always good. So more system and or RAM FSB.

Tighter timings at lower clock is not always better then slightly loos timins at higher FSB/RAM Frequency. Such as, cl5 @ DDR1100 - 1200 is certainly better then cl4 @ only DDR800 - 1000. Not to mention, the possable better latency overall if giver more mobo FSB.

My E6750 @ 480x8 w/ DDR1153 a 5:6 @ 5-5-5-15 is scoring just pionts above then if @ 500x8 @ DDR1000 w/ 1:1 @ 4-4-4-9. not noticable in real world apps. But numbers show the slight loss in FSB is made up by the added RAM Frequency.

 

Ray, yeah grab the zune theme.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078

 

sorry im late but the rv670 is nowhere near the g92, not even in its league. yes ati is cheaper, because they are aimed more at the mid range and not as a replacment for their higher end cards. they are there to fill the gap between the 2600 and 2900pro whereas the g92 is a replacment for nvidias second tier cards the 8800gts (320/640mb) so of course they are going to cost more but for that extra price they also perform better.

crysis is a good one, when i had xp i ran the bench in the bin file, all maxxed out @ 12/10 res over 5 loops of the demo i got an average of 68fps with my card only clocked at 730 core 1840 shader and 975 mem. how does a rv670 do at that setting? it might do ok until you turn the filters on and that is where the g92 pulls away. i mean who plays without aa now? and its this that gives the gt/gts 512 its edge. yes the 3870 is good for its price but a little more for a 88gt/gts gets you alot more performance. 3dmark 06 yea its sythetic but it does give a level playing field to compare how they stack up, have look around, how many rv670 can beat 14k with a single card? not many and i bet those that do have a quad core cpu.


15% without filters +20% with

oh if your interested at the same res in vista 64 for crysis again all maxxed i get 26fps at the same clocks.


@sam those pics are so old the comparisons are usless m8, you was comparing a card with mature drivers against one that was, at the time, very infintile, yes the older ati cards had better iq against the nvidia ones then but at the same time the loder intels got spanked by amd, at the time so....times have changed. if you want a reason to by ati or amd parts, do it because they need your money till horowitz (google is your friend, he was the guy who lead the team for conroe) can design and make their next cpu dont do it because you think they are offering the best bang for your buck as that is clearly going to the 88gt.

edit

the only reason, and this will only aply to a few people, to go with the 38xx is becuase they scale better with xfire than the gt does in sli but if your going to get 2 cards money isn't really a problem so chances are your not looking at these cards anyway.

 

No offense marsey, but I'm getting tired of people not really reading.

Go back and check, we are talking about the 8800GT 256MB and the HD 3850 256MB. Now show me graphs of those and tell me how G92 is better. It just depends on the card you see. The G92 is better when 8800GT 512 vs 3870, but it sucks when compared 8800GT 256 vs 3850 256.

The thing is that it's 50+ dollars MORE and it takes MORE power to run, and it gets hotter, for lower quality and lower framerates.

 

your right, i did miss the 256mb part but tbh who really wants a gaming machine that is so limited by its gpu mem? for modern games with aa and af you need 512mb min.

88gt 256 vs 512 38xx do?







the 256 suffers with its lack of mem with the filters on and thats not really a surprise is it?

another site, another review, same results


takes more power?



not when its working they dont, but they do at idle...50/50

its priced more than the 3850 because most of the time it beats it and its not too far behind the 3870, but like i started with if you want to game you need 512mb.

edit
middle imgs wont show

 

abuzar1,
After doing a bunch of "Homework", and considering what you and others have said, I'm concluding that this card would represent the absolute best bang for the buck at $164.
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10007260

Don't bother with the DDR3 - DDR4 argument as I know the DDR4 is better, but it takes a pretty good boost in price to get it. For the money and what you get for that money, this card would be tough to beat. Based on what I've read and the few people that I personally know that have bought the 3850 256 and 512 and the 3870 with both DDR3 and DDR4, I would opt for the 512 version of the 8800GT for myself! I know one Doctor who finally sold his HD-3870 and bought the 512 8800GT because he was so tired of errors and glitches in his games, which I'm sure are more due to "Greenness" of the cards bios/drivers than anything. He felt that the extra $105 was worth it! As he put it, "it's not a GTX or Ultra, but then again, neither is the price"!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

after looking at some of the prices in the states it does seem the 88gt is over priced compared to the prices in the uk. makes a change

we have them from £140 for the 3870 512 and £180 for the 8800gt 512.

@russ

as for the newness of the hardware and the greeness of their respective drivers you could say its the same with both as the g92 is also completly new tech too.

edit

as for the gt getting hot, well yea, thats why i got a gts as once i added in the cost of a new cooler and the fact that the gt was hard to get hold of i went with the gts.

 

Just to pitch in - I got my 8800gt 512mb o/c (650/1900) inc delivery for £173 before chrismas. A 3870 that would even come close to my card (i.e. one with a clockspeed well over 800mhz) would have cost me £15-20 more and I wouldn't have got it until 2 weeks after christmas. Complete no-brainer for me! (and look at the benchies!

 

Shaffaaf: Suit yourself, but even though I'm not taking sides, to me the 3870 stands out as the clearly better product. As for the 6800GT, it may well have overclocked better, but back then I didn't really OC for any more than just an experiment.

Abuzar: Now on the cooler I do agree, not necessarily on the rear-exhaust cooler (although that helps) but just having a decent cooler in the first place. I have no issue with my GPU's heat ending up in the case, because my side fan carries all the hot air from it straight out.

Theone: Just goes to show that the species of 'cretin' is still alive and well... They don't push much air, that's correct. They don't need to. Most of the people who bought the Antec 900 put the fans on high, when their temperatures would barely be any worse on low. zomgxmoreairflow!!1!!
NZXT fans push 1100rpm and around 40-45CFM. I run my case fans at 700rpm to move about 30CFM. Do I have any temperature issues? As if!
Additionally, why did they buy the NZXT HUSH case if they didn't want quiet? Surely a noise-dampening case designed for quiet computing with turbo-speed fans defies the whole point? morons...

Ck: If you buy an arctic cooling 12cm fan, nothing will change. They don't push much air either. If you don't feel that twice as much airflow as I use in my case is adequate, then go for an S-Flex SFF21F fan instead.

Marsey? Erm, excuse me? The HD3870 beats the 2900XT almost every time, so how you can say it's a gap between the 2600 and 2900 pro is beyond me.

No it isn't.
There is no game other than Crysis that runs that badly, and given such it's no guarantee of how games will run to come, plus the fact that the nvidia drivers are biased to give large frame rate advantages. Been reading a bit much into the nvidia sideof things?
As for crossfire, I even disagree with that. I think SLi works better than Crossfire, not that I'd recommend either.

Theone: Did the doctor even consider a driver upgrade? I don't know any 3800 series owner who's ever had issues like that. If anyone has, come forward.

[I apologise for the angry nature of this post. Suffice to say I'm not in a good mood since I have an exam in a couple of hours and woke up to inexplicably find every bone in my body aching...]

 

Look now it's my turn!









Russ, you're right the 3850 DOES have the best bang for the buck. That's why I have one

 

first up, dont worry bout it, you should know we aint easily offended around here m8y

sam i remmebber not so long back we had a discussion along these lines about oblivion, now if you think using crysis as a real world test is a bad idea please explain why. the engine it is baseed on will be one of the most widley use in pc games (along with unreal 3) by the end of the year and as such it is ideal. just because those who still have old tech cant run it well does not mean it is a bad choice of test. even those with newwer tech still have some issues at higher ers and with all the eye candy and as such those couple of extra frames here and there really do tell alot.

i love the way you used biased, im sure the word you are looking for is optimised but nither here nor there. yes i know there are ways to alter the .exe to give the green team a boost but i dont want to lose the iq you get from doing that and if you mean the fact that nvidia brought out 6 drivers in 2 weeks just to get crysis running as well as they can personally i see that as great customer service.

the 3870 is much like the 512 gts in the respect that it too can out perform its bigger older brother in some cases but up the res and add on the filters and both the 29 and the gtx strech there legs over their newwer tech sibblings and this is why both are still being made and have yet to reach their eol.

xfire scales much better than sli. sli, if your lucky will give 140% over a sinlge card setup but xfire is pushing 160% in some cases and this is ati's trump card for 08. wait till next month when the 3870x2 or gemini or whatever they end up calling it comes out and they have quad core xfire going up against the 98gx2 quad sli, atis on pcb link between the gpu cores should trounch all over it. but hey i must only be reaading about nvidia stuff me

good luck with the exam.


edit

@abuzar

so let me get this right in my head as i seem to be mistaken, you are comparing a 256mb card against 512 variants? what a supprise with the winner there then eh?

pmsl

right are you going to argue that amd i stommping all over intel next by comparing phenoms to e2000's?

 

I hope the 3870X2 is a bit cheaper. Right now building a quality Crossfire system is going to cost me round 1500 and I can't afford that.

 

There are worse benchmarks out there than Crysis, to an extent I go along with Russ' argument that 3dmark isn't really a great indicator of system performance. That's not because the test is inherently flawed, more that it allows you to get a good score with a poorly optimised PC if you play to the system (ahem Geforce FX!)
Oblivion I think was a difficult benchmark because the performance differed so much in the game's two different areas. However, it suffered the same issues at Crysis in that it had the potential to look great, but really didn't until you used a third-party patch. As far as Crysis goes, I expect new games to be based on its engine, but I pray they're better optimised than Crysis. I have no objection to a new game having a huge hardware requirement - industry pace-setters always have done, albeit not to this extent. What gets me is that I don't think the game is optimised well, given the distinct flaws in its rendering. Demanding games usually are so due to shadows. If that's true, why are Crysis' shadows rubbish?
As for the nvidia drivers I'll stick with biased. Optimised drivers would get something out of it, but reducing the rendering capability for extra frames doesn't sound like optimisation to me. Make the prettiest game look worse so it runs better - what was the point?
6 drivers in 2 weeks - while I take your point about CS, how did they get it wrong five times?
As far as crossfire goes, those performance margins would be great, if they worked in enough games. So far though, I've yet to be impressed.
As far as bang for the buck goes:
HD3850 256MB: £100
HD3850 512MB: £120
HD3870 512MB: £135
8800GT 256MB: £125
8800GT 512MB: £175

As you can see, in the UK the pricing is a little more skewed than the US!

 

check the edit ^^^^


3850>8800gs? same price point, but thats not out, or is it????