8800GT Overclock Comparison

Introduction & Goals

In response to some questions about how much benefit there is in overclocking your gpu in real world situations I've compiled a comparison between the stock performance of the 8800GT, and the overlocked performance. The games being compared are HL2 EP2, Prey, and Crysis. For synthetics I will run through 3dmark06 and compare overall scores and the GPU scores.

SYSTEM CONFIGURATION

CPU: E6300 @3.4GHz

Motherboard: Asus P5B Deluxe

Ram: Mushkin HP2-6400 @4-5-4-15 2 Gig Kit

HDD: 2 Seagate Baracuda 320 Gig Drives in RAID 0 array

KFA 8800GT with Coolermaster Heatpipe Cooler

PSU: OCZ Game Xtreme 700W

First let's take a brief look at the method of overclocking the 8800GT. I will use the official tool from nVidia, "nTune". The first thing to do when using ntune is to access the overclocking utilities. To do this you must accept the terms in a usage agreement screen.

Sign...er...click your life away

Once you accept the terms of usage you open up more options. The section we want is the 'adjust GPU settings screen'. From here you can adjust the GPU core clock speed, the memory frequency speed, and the fan control.

Crank those babies up!

Before doing any overclocking I suggest manually adjusting the fan to a high percentage of it's maximum speed. I would recommend 70% and above. If you have a cooler that isn't garbage, it shouldn't be too loud. After setting the fan speed to a level that will keep your card, and GPU cool you can start upping the memory, and GPU frequencies. Now the highest overclock for this card I was able to get stable was 700/1000. Doing some research, this is the max many have gotten to with the 8800GT, so I was satisfied with this. If you were doing this don't be upset if yours doesn't reach this, a little lower is an acceptable overclock.

You should now be able to save the settings and then play games with better frame rates. Let's take a look at the results I've seen with my overclock.

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