The GTX 280M Overclocking and Benchmarking Results Thread

Wow your stock runs are even higher than my overclocked scores.

 

Yeah, he got about 200 more than my 9800m gt.

I want GTX 280M and that beastly CPU in my M860

 

I score 5071 in GPU with 9800M GT @ 600 950 1500..

 

i get a 5700 on one card and am getting killed by a single 4870 at 6800 gpu points gpu, but 11,016 gpu using two cards i hold the world record....

still cant figure that one out yet.

 

i thought crossfire scaled better then sli. you seem to get more then double. i don't know how much i get for a single card.

 

Does Physx on/off affect the GPU score?

 

depends on the game. As for Vantage, could be a number of things specific for that 4870. From my experience, Vantage scales almost linear with muti GPU setups (except when I paired my old desktop 4850 with a 4870).

It doesn't.

 

It's weird, on 185.85, I keep getting the Device Lost error when running 3DMark 06, sometime it happens during one of the tests, sometime right when one of the two tests load and that's with a mild overclock 640/1500/800 on 1.05v and the weird thing is that these instabilities are inconsistent, sounds like a shi**y driver?

 

got a GTX 280M in a M860TU to work? I'd like to see how it runs. Keep us posted!

 

If you were running those same benchmarks prior to installing this new driver and had no issues even with overclocking then ya i would chalk it up as a driver issue . Some drivers act very funky when you OC .

 

Yep I was about to start a thread with pictures this morning but the website was down, now I'm in the middle of overclocking the thing!!

I actually upgraded from a 9800m GT and I changed drivers also.

 

Try some older drivers for sure and check the results. It could also possibly be your powersupply cant handle the extra load from the 280m. I wouldnt rule it out till i tested everything else. Btw how are the temps on the card at stock ?.

 

Ok I just ran a succesful loop of 3DMark06 at 600/1500/1000 and score 12 092, this is on an Apex SSD, not the sig Vertex. I'm using another SSD because I don't want to ruin my Vista installation if overclocks go unstable etc. So at least I should be guaranteed to break the 12k with that GPU, my 9800m GT topped at 11 805, it was a king overclocker though; that GTX280m seems kind of dull at overclocking the core and shaders.
Will fire up some Furmark after to finalize my overclocks.

Regarding temperatures, I idle in the 40s, however I have an heatsink that wasn't designed for this card, therefore there isn't really good contact with the die and temps could be lower. I had to do so much to at least have the heatsink touch the die: lap the GPU heatsink and remove the black tape around the die covering the resistors so that the large heatsink could lay straight up flat on the die, I'll post pics later. Afer 3 mins of stability test in Furmark, my temps go in the high 70s, probably higher if I leave it longer, but during stress testing, I'll be using a notebook cooler.

 

Did you do any vantage runs with the 9800gt ? id rather see the GPU runs of those numbers compared to 280m.

 

it's the driver manuel or you have to find the right inf file to use out of the 20 or so they supply.
do a search for which ones have the gtx280m in them, then try each one using the same clocks. i was trying to use nvcv for mine and it kept crashing so i tried nvam and it worked fine, but scoring was still lower than using 185.20. so i went back.

 

I'll check with the drivers later. However one thing though, my fans don't kick in at 100% before the GPU gets in the 90c range which really sucks, I would rather have it go 100% as soon as I go above 74c or so. Is there anyways to change that, also lowering the critical temperature from 108c in the GPU BIOS would make the fans run 100% sooner?

 

You could just hit the max fan key, Fn + 1, but then the PC sounds like a jet during liftoff. I'm sure the BIOS can be changed or perhaps even tweaked by software, but I'm not sure...

 

yes, but not sure if it really works on the gtx280m
you can make changes to the fanspeed ic in the vbios.

also the main part about the 280 people are forgetting... your no longer at 90'c like the 9800m series. your at 108'c. so you still have a ways to go...that's why
and that 108 has a compensation of 8 degrees as well(speculation)...making it 116 degrees or so.

 

Aha lol for some reason it doesn't work though for me, perhaps because I'm on a NP8660. I'm now going to try playing around the drivers infs and let you guys know how it goes.

EDIT: just scored 12 163 by upping the memory to 1050, I tried 1100 but after a few seconds in 3DMark, the screen froze and artifacts appeared. I am currently using the desktop version of 185.85. I'll try playing around the core and shaders now.

EDIT (again): ZOMG/ OMFG! So with the desktop drivers (185.85), I was able to finally overclock madly my graphic card, for now it's benchmark stable, but I'll only be satisfied with 24/7 stable, running at 650/1625/1025, I scored 12 451, I never thought that I would ever see such numbers on a 15.4" laptop ! Now I'm going to try putting the memory back to 1050MHz and see what happens. It seems as if my issue was driver related, hopefully it was. When I'll have a perfectly stable OC, I will go back on my Vertex SSD with my clean Operating System and I should get a few more points.

Info: starting at around 1025MHz on the memory, it's deminishing returns, at 1050MHz, I only gained 12 points, I'm going to check what happens when dropping down to 1GHz. Unstable GPU memory is the #1 way to crash the whole system when playing games so if an extra 50MHz makes very little difference, I might as well stay at 1GHz.

EDIT: dropping the memory down to 1GHz resulted in a loss of 108 marks. 1025MHz seems to be the happy medium. I'm going to run again at 1025MHz to rule out the margin of error.
Ok I regained 70 points, margin of error was about 30 points.

 

Hmmm... ATI 4k single card still winning?

 

yep, single card still winning
(make that 4850/4870 cards)

 

Alright 650/1625/1025 wasn't stable in Crysis, crashed after 10 mins, going to try 650/1625/1000.

 

Judging from your memory experience I am guessing they might have upped the memory frequency to 1100 Mhz. Do you remember what was written on your GDDR ?

 

No sorry I completely forgot about reading that it said on the memory chips. I was so frustrated about the heatsink not fitting properly that it was the only thing I was thinking about.

Anyways, 650/1625/1000 crashed after 10 mins as well, easy culprit: core/shaders too high, going to try 640/1600/1025.

 

Try just lowering the memory frequencies and keep all else stable. Generally how you do it, is first find the max stable core/shader speeds and then the memory speed.

Anyway, good job with the heatsink. When I've tried to stick a 9800M GTX in the M860TU it was running at 60C idle and would easily go above 90 in gaming. But it was for testing, I've never tried to get the heat sink fit properly.

 

drop shaders. 600/1500/1050.
see if it will make it through test 5/6. then start going up from there. using test 5/6 only till it crashes.

 

It took me hours to get it done right. But I'm still going to order the GTX260m heatsink assembly since it should work properly with the GTX280m considering that they are physically the same.

Anyways, 640/1600/1025 wasn't stable either, but I got 12 minutes this time! Going to try 630/1575/1025.

EDIT: I was able to play 20 minutes before it crashed, going to try 624/1560/1025. Crysis is not very memory dependant, I'll run GTA IV when I'll try to test the memory.

 

I knew the 280M would work! Yeah the 260M heatsink should be top priority, because it will fit the card's memory chips properly, among other things.

Hmm I need to catch up. You're getting too far ahead of me.

 

Aha lol Kevin, I was the guinea pig this time.

So anyways I managed to get more than an hour stable in Crysis with 624/1560/1000, I stopped before getting any error so this should be a good base overclock with 1.05v. Going to try more things!

 

Damn, that's close to my stable OC. Looks like the card is reaching its limits in terms of overclocking . Sad, I was hoping to push it to 650/1625/1000 - stable.

I can actually run the 620/1550 clocks as well, but they are just too hot to consider them safe.

 

Hey Blacky,

Yeah I think we're reaching our maximum stable OCs. I have to leave but until now I was running without any crash at 630/1575/1000 for more than an half hour in Crysis. Most people with GTX280m should therefore experiment around these clocks at 1.05v.

And if 630/1575/1000 could remain stable, it would be great, it still scores 12 303 3DMarks and I'll probably score higher when I switch to the other SSD. The GTX280m is nowhere near a beast at overclocking, my 9800m GT ran 24/7 stable for 4 months at 640/1600/1000 and doesn't score far from the GTX280m. By the way, if anyone is interested to purchase my old MXM 2.1 9800m GT, PM me. If you're not looking for bragging rights, that 9800m GT would kill the stock and perhaps overclocked GTX260m and get close to the GTX280m.

 

Nice results. I´m still fighting against my 3700M in 86TU. Not heat issus but something else.

 

H-Emmanuel, what temps do you get?

 

Word. Post an HWMonitor screen please.

 

H-Emmanuel, would love to see some pics on the heatsink and the GPU, looks like the gtx 260m and 280m build isn't like the 9800m series.

 

I'll post pics later regarding the heatsink, here you go for the temperature, this was taken at idle on a notebook cooler, otherwise the temperature would be around 45c.

 

Cool. What's the highest temp you've seen, off of the cooler?

Once you get that 260M heatsink, you'll be good to go.

 

Well it depends, the highest I've seen was 92c in 2 seconds in Furmark because there was no contact between the die and the heatsink. But after, I've seen it in the high 80s in Furmark stability test when I modified both the heatsink and video card. By the way 630/1575/980 is my newest most stable overclock. Deadspace and GTAIV that are very memory dependant no longer crash, or at least they didn't for one hour.

 

what?? i thought 260m was a smaller and faster 9800 gtx

 

It's basically a 9800m GTX but my 9800m GT was a golden overclocker, it reached clocks that were 24/7 stable with acceptable temperature and had higher performance than a stock GTX260m. When my GTX280m wasn't overclocked, it was only like 200 3DMarks away from my 9800m GT, now it's 445 points away, but it's still not drastic.

Anyways I'm now back on the Vertex, flashed my custom BIOS on the GPU, it should be my final/near final OC for this card depending on if I have to lower clocks a bit more. Anyone about to embark on an overclocking journey for their card, I highly recommend that you use a spare hard drive with another installation on it where you can actually test stability and not risk your data, because my unstable memory and drivers caused me to force the computer off sometimes because the driver wouldn't recover.

These clocks were stable for 1H of Crysis, 1H of GTA IV, 30 mins of Dead Space, 15 mins of ATI Tool artifact scanner (for the hell of it lol, a classic!); not a single crash of artifact.

Now the question is, why the hell didn't Clevo allow a GTX280m in their M860TU, the fact that the GPU is 55nm but still based on G92 obviously translates in lower temperatures.

 

Do you have any benchmarks results in games? Crysis, DMC3, FC2 etc. Would be nice, and with some HWMonitor pics after the tests.

I want a GTX 280M. Would be awsome =)

How much did you pay for it?

 

Your max clocks are going to vary based on driver and application. I can run 3dmark06 all day @650/1650/1025, but if I use the same clocks for an actual game, I'll crash within 10 minutes. 625/1625/1000 has been stable as a rock though, it has never crashed, performance is very good, and temps are fine. My highest achieved clocks were 660/1690/1030 for Vantage, but that's kind of hard to replicate, and that was with 185.20 drivers. That's the end of the line for my card unless I can somehow push voltage higher. Since I didn't make the .rom, I'm not really sure what it's set at

 

Oh yeah, I picked up GTA4 and Stalker yesterday or $30 and $10, hehe. I didn't play with the settings too much on GTA4, but I'll need to, at least until I get the QX9300. But I just installed clear sky and the latest patch, and surprisingly it runs pretty well maxed out! I'll have some more details later.

 

Yeah I didn't try running the shaders out of the core 2.5 ratio and I modified my own ROM and you can't and shouldn't anyways go above 1.05v for the card, it'll probably kill it.

 

if you are using my "ovolted" bios, it is @ 1.05v obviously..

 

Depending on the card it could very well be something else than 1.05v, it's just that for G92 cards, we were able to go up to 1.05v with BIOS mods.

 

If you are crazy enough you can try the 9800M GTS BIOS. If you switch the device ID with nibitor to 9800M GTS it will read the card correctly and will allow you to push the voltages really high. But do this at your own risk...

 

Nah LOL! Not happening on my GTX280m, can't risk my $500 card (for those who wanted to know the price) and it now runs stable and cool, couldn't be happier. I've already done enough mods to it, now I'll let it actually run; for now it lived longer in DOS behind the screens of nvflash than in games!

 

hmm...500USD is a good price....

 

Yeah, unlike the one you could get for 500 EUROs instead.
Due to 55nm production instead of 65nm, it allows to cut prices, therefore the 9800m GTX and GT cost more than the GTX260m or GTX280m.