The Gaming PC Building/Upgrade Thread

[ameratsu]

I might as well contribute something here:

Nvidia overclocking.

For those of you with Nvidia video cards, there's a great app out there called RivaTuner. I highly recommend downloading it if you want to get even a little more out of your video card.

For the sake of providing an example, here's my video card, at stock frequencies, in RivaTuner.

My 8800gs is clocked like that from the factory. Have you ever seen those "overclocked" cards being sold for a little more than the regular card? They are usually just the best cards they produce clocked higher than regular cards like mine. Most nvidia cards can be overclocked quite easily. Do a quick google search to see what sort of results people are getting from whatever particular card you have or are thinking of buying. Below is the result I run very stably. As in - no crashing, graphics glitches or other problems.

Which is very good considering my card was $50 AR in late 2008, and still runs most new games on high settings when o/cd.

Just for reference, again using my card as an example..

The 8800GS TOP - The premium version of my card 

"The core comes in clocked at 600MHz which gives us a 1700MHz shader clock. 900MHz memory clock."

My 8800 GS 384mb - The regular version

"The core comes in clocked at 550Mhz which gives us a 1375Mz shader clock. 800MHz memory clock"

While the TOP performs slightly better than my card, as you can see as a premium product there is extremely little difference performance wise between the two cards once the regular version is pushed in RivaTuner. Of course both are outdated now, but this was just for example's sake. For that reason, it would be my suggestion to avoid pre-overclocked cards when shopping for a video card and instead look at what sort of results people are getting from overclocking regular versions of that particular card if you are interested in overclocking.

Overclocking notes (thanks Soleron): Manual overclocking voids the warranty and increases the power consumption of the GPU. So if people want to do that they should bear that in mind. My Note: Your GPU will run hotter than one that isn't overclocked so pay attention to temps when running an overclocked card.

If anyone notices factual errors or things that need to be added, please let me know.