Worthwhile Overclock?

I've been doing some overclocking of my dual 8800 GTX cards in my NP9262 and would be very interested to hear people's opinions on if these results are worthwhile. Also, a huge thanks to GangstaOne who has been helping me with vBios and general guidelines.

The overclock I settled on was 600 core, 1500 shader, 960 memory @ 1.05 volts. This is up from the default of 500 core, 1250 shader, 800 memory @ 1.00 volts. Normalizing the various frequencies by their GCD, this turns out to be an 18.23% overclock.

I ran three benchmarks to gauge overclocking performance: 3dMark06 at default, Crysis Benchmarking Tool, and Company of Heroes performance test.

I will skip all of the numbers (and there are a lot, I made an Excel sheet to track min, max, avg fps and performance percentage gains). Anyway, cutting to the chase, all results seem to indicate that I receive about an 11-13% increase in fps. So, in real world gaming situations, I'm looking at about an 11-13% increase, at least 10%.

Obviously, this is not the linear relationship I had hoped for. Thing is, I'm not too knowledgeable about video card overclocking, since all my overclocking up to this point was always done on CPUs, not GPUs. I played Crysis for 3 hours straight with the higher clocks and didn't notice any problems, so it SEEMS stable, but who really knows right?

My question: is this 11-13% gain a worthwhile overclock to be running at higher voltage and temps? Can the 8800m put up with long-term higher voltage and higher clocks without crapping out before its useful life (say 5 years max)? Should I bother with the higher clocks or just run at stock clocks, given the results I see in benchmarking?

 

No. Overclock = more heat = shorter lifespan.

I will grant you ten percent is a pretty nice boost, but you are slowly (quickly) killing your laptop with its poor heat dissipation.

Years ago, overclocking was a worthwhile endeavor--you could take a piece of crap CPU and boost it not by 5 to 10 percent, but 100 to 200 percent. Now overclocking is done out of curiousity and bragging rights, not because there is any real-world gain.

You will be lucky to get 3 years out of that gpu in normal mode--overclocking will cut its life in half. I can understand over-clocking it three years from now when new games come out and you need the extra FPS, but that's when it's ending it's life cycle. Overclocking now is just foolish.

my two cents

 

ooooo I strongly disagree. Keep in mind, thermal issues are significant - you need to track temps and ensure you don't run too hot.

However, you can often get a significant overclock without serious thermal issues - your fans just turn on sooner and run faster, so you get more noise but no more heat.

Thus, no GPU lifespan shortening.

That said, how long are you intending to keep a GPU anyways? While I've overclocked every GPU I've ever owned, I've never had one fail before I've upgraded it. Ever. I typically keep a given GPU - overclocked it's whole life - for around 3 years, then I sell it. My last is still in use in my buddies PC; still overclocked.

Further, there's a problem with your benchmark suite, and I'll recommend a change to try it again and get more accurate numbers. In 3DMark06, at default settings with the 8800M GTX, it is HIGHLY cpu bound. A CPU overclock nets huge gains, while GPU overclocks do very little. Instead, run 3dMark06 at max res, with high settings. Basically, run it at the resolution and other settings that you'd actually play games at. This way it taxes your GPU much harder, and creates a more realistic "real world" benchmark.

Now, to be fair, I'm not sure what the D901C's heat dissipation is like (as I don't own one) but for my M570RU, heat is a non-issue. Clevo's cooling systems are noisy, but extremely effective. Laptop coolers are an option as well for serious gaming, and they can make an extreme difference in overall operating temperatures.

 

remind me not to buy any used gpus from you....

that said, I disagree....damage is caused by constant heat/cool cycling...(not to mention the wear and tear on your fans)...to suggest that there is no damage created by overclocking contradicts the engineers who designed these products.

And three years is the life cycle? Three years may be your useful life, but other people keep computers and peripherals much longer than that....I'm still running an intel starfire agp card in one of my servers. If I had overclocked it 10 years ago, it would be sitting in a landfill.

Anyway, I can appreciate where you are going, but when someone says he or she is looking to get five years out of something, someone who considers the product lifecycle to be 3 years is the wrong person to be giving advice.

I actually agree with you--anything after three years is gravy (especially for a laptop), but if you want longevity, don't push it for what is at best a nominal gain

 

I would have to disagree. As I wrote in my original post, I ran not only 3dMark06, but also the Crysis Benchmark Tool (using the exact Crysis settings I play at), as well as the Company of Heroes Tool (also at real-world gaming settings).

I considered the results from the Crysis test with the highest degree of weight, followed by Company of Heroes, followed by 3dMark06, which I know is quite CPU bound.

That being said, I think I agree with you regarding performance vs. life. While I said I would keep these cards for 5 years, that is only as backup. The longest I've ever had a laptop for is 2 consecutive years, and then I upgraded. Ideally, I would use my current 8800m setup for no more than 2 years as my primary notebook, and then shift it to a backup when I get something with more powerful video cards.

I also agree that the gains may be somewhat nominal. On the crysis gpu_benchmark level I score only +5 avg fps with the overclock, and on the assault benchmark level, the gain is less than +1 fps.

However, I'm just not sure how much abuse this card can take. I've heard that some video cards can run at increased clocks and voltages no problem for quite a number of years. Also, cooling is not a concern with this laptop. Sager stock cooling keeps this thing at 63 degrees max, even overclocked playing Crysis for 3 hours.

 

Sure, the heat/cool cycling is going to have a significant impact on the life of your card; but that's more of a constant than anything. Overclocking, if done correctly, will not impact that: Your card won't cycle hot/cold any more frequently. That's really a function of how often you're starting and stopping gaming more than anything else. It will heat up marginally more - not a lot more, if your OCing within your cooling systems ability to manage.

The rated clock speeds for chips are always lower than what they can safely manage. This is to ensure that manufacturing inaccuracies do not render cards DOA. Unfortunately, it's not like the old days where, like you said, you could gain obscene amounts of performance, but you still can gain some.

The key is to do it properly, test and test some more, ensure you're running within safe thermal limits and are completely stable.

Not necessarily. You've got to consider the actual gaming life of a card, moreso than it's total life. Your AGP card, for example, likely isn't ever even in 3D anymore, let alone being stressed. The clock is ticking for all electronic equipment from the day it's made, really - and ultimately, the total time you have with any given component is really pretty much random - countless people have stock cards fail on them early, for example.

It's a fallacy that any overclocking dramatically decreases component life time. Excessive overclocking? Absolutely, no doubt at all. But if done correctly, if you maintain specified thermal limits, the impact on your card is negligible.

 

I love the back and forth this topic makes. Good for an interesting debate. Everybody here is mostly correct. I guess it really just comes to what you want to do with it. For me, I love pushing every ounce of power out of my system. I also upgrade any time some thing majorly different comes out (mobile GT280's... whenever that may be...) So putting the extra load on the system is fine by me.

In my opinion, as long as you run your fans high when the Extra voltage and frequencies kick in, and you not overvolt from the standard 1v, you should be fine. Keep in mind, however, the Dell volts their GTX cards to 1.05v... which the engineers designed this version of the card to run at.

I like to think of all the big offroad trucks I see around here. Not a one of them has a spec of dirt on them. They've never left the pavement. Sure they look cool and mean, but what a waste of money if your not going to get what you've put into it. Use what you've got, and don't be afraid to get a little dirty.

 

~laughs~ I agree completely, but to be fair... Those guys who never go offroad probably will get more miles out of their trucks in the end. Less fun, but more miles

While I definitely contend that proper OCing doesn't cause any significant extra wear, Gerry was coming at the whole discussion from a "long term use" perspective, so he's got a point there. That's why I keep stressing careful, proper OCing, though, as the counterpoint

All depends on your intended use, really. If your considering around 2-3 years of serious gaming use, then however long as just a secondary system, then go nuts overclocking. Anything within reasonable limits (even with some voltage increases when possible) will be fine in that sort of situation.

 

This is really interesting to me. You're saying the 8800 GTXs on the Dell M1730 run at 1.05 volts? The Sager ships at 1.00 volts...

I guess that's my biggest concern really. I don't mind running at higher clocks at all, it's the higher-than-stock voltage setting of 1.05 volts that bothers me and makes me question if this overclock is worth it. However, if you say that this card was designed to run at 1.05 volts, then that is very tempting...

 

Well the actual G92 architecture, which the 8800M GTX is based on, was engineered to be run at 1.15v. Technically, were you to get a vBIOS that could truly volt that high on these cards, you could do so without issues in electromigration, which is the main damage caused by an overvolting and overheating combination. But of course, our issue is heat, and volting up to 1.15v is not feasable unless we have a BIOS engineer somewhere on the forums... I did some testing at this voltage, and all though its not truly running at the v, the heat would jump up to around 80-90C on the core. If you look at the vBIOS for these cards however, the overheat alarm is 90C. Running at 1.05v, my temps have never gone above 65C with the fans running.

The Dell cards seem to have a better BIOS from what I gather. The guys over at mvktech claim speeds stable at 700mhz core. The higher voltage has something to do with that. I thinking about trying to flash a Dell BIOS onto the card and seeing what I get, and hoping I don't have to do another blind flash. I think I'll try that tonight and let you know what I get.

 

Do you think I should be able to run clocks of 600 / 1500 / 960 at 1.00 volts? I tried that (can't recall if I used the stock vBIOS or adjusted the voltage table to get to 1.00), and I recall it wasn't stable (it crashed out in 3dMark06). I set it to 1.05 volts and it worked, however, gathering from your overclocking experience, I should be able to manage my OC clocks at 1.00 volts?

 

If I recall, I always had a few issues OC'ing at 1v. Try pulling down your mem clock to around 900 and see if that helps you keep it stable. Run your fans on full until the temps drop down to ambient temps before you run. You should be fine at 1.05v, so long as you aren't trying to OC in the Sahara. When I was testing 1.15v, I put the system over my air conditioning vent to keep the temps down.

 

It seems that higher clocks and voltages are expressed on the video card as increased heat. Assuming you take that heat out of the equation (super great cooling), then are there any other adverse effects playing out on the card through higher clocks and voltages? I know that electrostatic migration is one, but that takes several years to really begin to show tangible damage.

 

Heat and wear and tear on your cooling system. I have seen cooling fan bearings burn out on cooling fans.

Bearing wear down--it is simple physics--friction equals wear and tear...once the bearing wears down sufficiently, it begins to wobble and wear down even faster.

Once this occurs, cooling efficiency plummets and wear and tear increases even more quickly.

Overclocking naturally increases increased cooling fan use and depending on the fan (is it variable speed or constant--most laptops are variable) the more heat you are disapating the more the fan spins and the faster it wears down.

Once again--I can not stress this enough.

Sure, you can overclock your devices for three years without problem and as many have pointed out, we're talking about careful overclocking.

In the real world, though, people are not careful. This forum may be the exception, but 95 percent of the people who own computers never open it up and clean out the dust bunnies...and laptops are far worse than desktops when it comes to the difficulty of cleaning.

I have a going on 5-year old sager np5680--I open it up and clean it out and reapply arctic silver every six months. The cooling system is efficient for its design. It works wonderfully.

I have opened up 3-month old laptops owned by people with cats, smokers or people who fry a lot of fish and the insides are so thick in crud you'd want to puke.

Overclocking is a gamble. If you do it, you need to do it carefully. But the gains of overclocking are really overstated today.

In the OP's post, he was talking about a 10 percent boost in a synthetic benchmark--in the real world, he probably would not notice the difference without the benchmark telling him

5 to 10 percent is nothing.

Now, when I had an old AMD k2-350 and I was overclocking it up to 500-550 mghtz--that was a huge gain and worth the risk---we're talking a 60 percent boost in performance.

But a gpu boost of 5-10 percent is negligable and anyone telling you different isn't being honest with him or herself.

 

Well I have to agree that a 10% gain isn't exactly a huge performance boost. I don't OC my GPU because I have my CPU OC'd, which for me yields the best result in real-time gaming. My cpu temps while oc'd haven't increased more that several degrees-Celsius, while giving me about 15-20 fps boost in cod4( as opposed to gpu OC ~10 fps boost). I play the game at native so I believe my cpu was bottlenecking just a bit.

 

While I'm going to switch over to a GPU overclock soon to compare, I'm currently OCing my CPU via a FSB OC, so I can't do the GPU as it is. My GPU won't software overclock, so I need to burn a modded bios, and just haven't gotten around to it yet. However, my 2.5ghz T9300 CPU OC'd to 2.9ghz maxes out at a mere 59 degrees C, with fans on auto, when fully loaded. That's undervolted to 1.1v - it's actually cooler than it ran without being overclocked at the stock voltage! Increasing the bus speed has a direct effect on the GPU as well (related to why we can't OC both the GPU and CPU simultaneously). I'm finding I get great performance results this way, so while I want to try out the GPU OC to compare, I'm currently really liking improved performance and battery life coupled with reduced heat.

Once I pick up a USB key to format as bootable (I currently use SD cards instead of USB keys as "floppies", but I can't boot off them) I'm going to drop the CPU OC, see if I can undervolt it further, then I'm going to crank up my GPU and compare results.

Anyways, all that rambling aside, GerryF makes a very, very good point:

You must maintain your system properly. This means you must ensure than it's air vents - intake and outlet, and it's fans, are clean and clear. I personally recommend a monthly dust cleaning.

You should do this no matter what, but if you overclock, then you need to pay extra attention to it. It's really unlikely that your cooling fans are going to die on you even if you OC, IF you keep them nice and clear.

The more dust and crud in your cooling system, the harder it needs to work, and the faster it'll die.