Overclocking - I Tried It And The Effect Has So Far Been Amazing

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westy159

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I have a feeling that something isnt right. Ive had my 128mb Geforce 6800XT (8pp, 4vp) for a while now and have never tried doing anything to it in fear of damaging it. Recently I have been frantic about getting a new graphics card with my tight budget so I could have a chance of keeping up with the latest games. But today, sick of trying to find the lowest priced 7600GT AGP in the UK, I just went for it.

Using Rivatuner I found to my amazement that my XT had a total of 16 pixel pipes and 6 vertex pipes (6800Ultra?). Only 8pp and 4vp were being used. I decided to go to vanilla 6800, i unlocked 4pp and 1vp. Restarting my PC to let the changes take places i gritted my teeth thinking that any second my computer would just explode...

Everything loaded as normal. I rushed to PC Wizard 06 expecting to see my GPU at volcano like tempreatures. They remained as normal. I tried the PC Wizard video card benchmark test. It got the same results as before. I went back to Rivatuner and it told me that the card was using 12pp and 5vp. So I tried a game.

I doubt many of you are familiar with the Total war series. I tried the Medieval 2 Total War demo which before hand ran at a jerky frame rate, even on medium/lower settings. I started a battle and everything was smoooth. I turned my settings and resolution up to the max and still everything was smooth. I couldnt believe it. Things did get jumpy as the fighting started but I expected much worse than that. Ok, I did only play for about 10 mins to rush back here to tell you all.

Really i didnt think it was possible to for it to have that much of a difference. Yet the benchmarking did remain the same. GPU temps are still run as they did before (60C-70C idle, 70C-80C load /i realise this is a bit hot but I have a old Dell case, poor cooling system). Now Im thinking of going further and unlocking the other 4pp and the other vp and overclocking my core and memory frequencys to GT/Ultra speeds. Though i have a feeling that is where I will over do it and everything goes wrong.

Still, if I leave it how it is I will be extremely happy. Its saved me a couple of hundred on buying a new card.
 
So are Nvidia just cheapskates? I mean did they produce all the 6800 series with 16pp and 6vp then just disable some of them for their "lower" versions (LE/XT) where they were sold at a lower but still profitable price. Then for the "higher" versions (GT/Ultra) they just left the pipelines enabled and sold them for an inflated price?

Also how would my card handle with all pipelines unlocked? just the same as the GT and Ultra versions do? So if I unlock them all the card will be fine or is there more to it than that?

EDIT: Tried another game, Hitman Blood Money. While at the same settings it did run 8 frames faster than before (17 - 25) I noticed that on some surfaces there where small distortions, possibly artifacts?

Heres a pic. Look at the top of the freezer on the right and on the seat of the right hand, red chair. See the white lines? Are those artifacts? If so what does this mean for me and my card?
 
Some have had good experince's unlocking the XT's fully but that's not the case 90% of the time,True sometime's they will take a higher card and lock a couple pipe's if the demand is great and their supply is short but that's not too likely with the XT's.
 
the xts are the normal cards that just didnt pass nvidas quality testing 100% so they disabled the piplenes and such, thats why xts are such good overclockers,

also if you unlocked everything and overclocked it to the gt speeds chances are youd need better cooling
 
artifacts is when you start to get the random colored pixels in game after youve oced your card. atleast thats what my 6600 started doing when i pushed it a little too far, after that i turned it back down.

i have a vanilla geforce6600, how do i unlock the pipes in rivatuner anyways?
 
hmm....weird. when i oc my cpu i get artifacting. it is hard to explain. the grass or something in my game will be extremely tall just extending infinitely into the sky. and when i play bf2 the other people will have long spike/spear like thing comming out of them. i also get the same think when i oc my gpu.
 
j369852147412 said:
hmm....weird. when i oc my cpu i get artifacting. it is hard to explain. the grass or something in my game will be extremely tall just extending infinitely into the sky. and when i play bf2 the other people will have long spike/spear like thing comming out of them. i also get the same think when i oc my gpu.

It may happen when you OC the CPU because you didn't lock the PCI bus, though I'm not sure.
 
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