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**Praetor** · 02-26-2006, 03:01 PM

Section 04 - VFAQ

How much can I overclock my videocard to?Nobody can tell you. Just because one dude hits a certain clock speed doesnt mean you will either, you may match that, surpass it or come up dismally short. The only way to find out how much you can overclock your videocard by is to try it out yourself
If I overclock my videocard, how much performance increase should I expect?Depends on the card, what you are overclocking and how much you are overclocking it by!
- As a trend, nVidia based cards seem to benifit more per clock cycle
- When overclocking you have the option of overclocking the coreclock, the memory clock or both. Depending on how what you are using to measure performance you will notice varying changes in performance depending on which you overclock
- Overclocking a GPU core by 10MHz wont produce anything noticeble; neither will overclocking the memory by 25MHz. Also something to consider: a videocard which uses a 128bit memory path will benifit less from each memory clock increase than on that uses a 256bit memory interface
- Overclocking a low end budget card in hopes of making it perform like a high end part will only result in failure, dissapointment and/or naivete. People who say they've overclock their budget gaming card by # percent and have gotten like twice the performance generally dont know what they are talking about. The reason (yes there is a reason) is that the bottleneck with budget parts is usually not the clock speed but something more crucial like the number of pipelines or the memory addressing bus width -- neither of which are affected by overclocking
- Some GPUs have frequency scaling where you wont notice any performance gains until you've overclocked by certain amounts. A bit is mentioned here
I've not bought a videocard yet but when I do, I want to overclock it, what should I look for when buying one? Either look for non-standard cooler (whether it be copper based, uses some form of exhaust or something else) or consider buying an aftermarket cooler. Increasing the cooling capacity (especially for the memory units) will help to improve the amount you can overclock by (why? because if the card, or some of its components, overheats then it may throttle itself and/or artifacts/corruption will show up). While cooling is only half the battle, it's a fairly easy thing to look after.
What brand should I buy? The general answer is, "if you're asking this then you probably wont notice all that much" The reasoning is that serious overclockers/performance nuts will have done their research and everybody else probably wont be pushing their hardware enough to notice any difference between brands etc. Now to actually answer the question, a "better" brand depends on how you define "better". Here are some scenarios
- BFG generally sells their cards as overclocked out of the box. Geneally speaking it's an insignificant overclock however people see the words "overclocked" and are willing to shell out money for it. Lucky BFG. BFG parts are generally very well made however there is a premium involved for their parts being "overclocked"
- ASUS products are generally very well made however they make a very wide variety of products catering to budget users (-X series) to the top (-TOP, EXTREME series) tier users so to group all ASUS products into one specific description is generally unfair. It is fair to say their products are generally very well made however they tend to do "wierd things" (i.e., power connectors on ASUS video cards arent standard etc). As a trend, ASUS parts are usually more expensive as well -- often worth it -- but expensive nonetheless
- XFX. What sets XFX apart from the rest (other than a difficult to open product box) is their product warranty is single-sale transferable (i.e., if you bought the card originally, you can sell the card and the next owner is entitled to the warranty as well) as well as their cards being usually overclocked a bit. Their pricing is pretty in line with their performance
- eVGA. Their selling point is an obscenely comprehensive warranty. Short of blatant damage to the card, it's covered. Naturally you need to read more into this before running off an buying a random eVGA card.
- HIS/Sapphire/Powercolor/Connect3D. These companies often make ship cards with some form of custom cooler which adds to the value of the card by reducing temperatures and improving overclockability
- Other..... read up on the company and see for yourself!
Should I get SLI/Crossfire? If you're asking this, the answer is "no". People who will benifit from this neat (and expensive) technological marvel have already made up their minds and bought the hardware for it. If you're asking about whether you should get it or not then you've not maximized your hardware enough to benifit from it (i.e., sort of how people who havnt quite learned how to use a basic calculator ... they shouldnt be messing with a graphing calculator quite yet). Now for a technical reason as to why one shouldnt go the multi-GPU route: consider the following scenarios

Dude is looking to buy a SLI-capable machine with a not-quite-top-of-the-line videocard and buying the second video card a few months later. Lets have a financial analysis
Popular SLI Motherboards ... [Min, Avg, Max] = [125,161,205]
- MSI K8N Neo4 SLI ... Sep 05 @ 125USD
- DFI Lanparty UT NF4 SLI-DR ... Sep 05 @ 165USD
- Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI ... Sep 05 @ 205USD
- ASUS A8N-SLI Premium ... Sep 05 @ 175USD
- Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI ... Sep 05 @ 135USD

Popular Non-SLI Motherboards ... [Min, Avg, Max] = [110,118,130]
- Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9 ... Sep 05 @ 115USD
- DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D ... Sep 05 @ 130USD
- ASUS A8N-E ... Sep 05 @ 110USD
- Abit AN8 Ultra ... Sep 05 @ 115USD
- MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum ... Sep 05 @ 120USD

Popular 6600GTs
- PNY GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 220USD, Feb 06 @ 150USD
- BFS GeForce 6600GT OC 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 190USD, Feb 06 @ 200USD
- Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 175USD, Feb 06 @ 150USD
- ASUS GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 185USD, Feb 06 @ 155USD
- XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 145USD, Feb 06 @ 120USD
- Chaintech GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 140USD, Feb 06 @ 125USD

Popular 6800GTs
- BFG GeForce 6800GT OC 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 320USD, Feb 06 @ 385USD
- MSI GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 325USD, Feb 06 @ 315USD
- Gigabyte GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 380USD, Feb 06 @ 380USD
- Leadtek GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 300USD, Feb 06 @ 300USD
- XFX GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 290USD, Feb 06 @ 300USD
- eVGA 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 290USD, Feb 06 @ 325USD

Some Current Cards
- Gigabyte 7800GT 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 295USD
- MSI GeForce 7800GT 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 265USD
- eVGA GeForce 7800GT 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 275USD
- BFG GeForce 7800GT OC 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 315USD
- eVGA GeForce 7800GT CO SE 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 260USD
- XFX GeForce 7800GTX 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 470USD
- MSI GeForce 7800GTX 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 435USD
- eVGA GeForce 7800GTX ACS3 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 435USD
- ASUS Radeon X1800XL 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 355USD
- Sapphire Radeon X1800XL 256MB ... Feb 06 @ $340USD
- Connect3D Radeon X1800XL 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 320USD
- MSI Radeon X1800XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 400USD
- Gigabyte Radeon X1800XT 512MB .. Feb 06 @ 395USD
- MSI Radeon X1900XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 530USD
- Powercolor Radeon X1900XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 480USD
- Connect3D Radeon X1900XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 510USD
Ok now that we have some figures lets do some math....
- Configuration 1: 6600GT-SLI ... SLI Motherboard (160USD) + Sep 05 6600GT (175USD) + Feb 06 6600GT (150USD) ... 485USD
- Configuration 2: 6800GT-SLI ... SLI Motherboard (160USD} + Sep 05 6800GT (320USD) + Feb 06 6800GT (330USD) ... 810USD
- Configuration 3: 6600GT -> 7800GT ... NonSLI Motherboard (118USD) + Sep 05 6600GT (175USD) + Feb 06 7800GT (260) ... 553USD
- Configuration 4: 6800GT --> 7800GT ... NonSLI Motherboard (118USD) + Sep 05 6800GT (320USD) + Feb 06 7800GT (260) ... 698USD
Analysis
Ive provided a whole bunch of number that you can use to make your own comparisons and calculations (note that for the 7800GT I chose the cheapest part ... the reasoning is, because we are not forced to pick a specific part then we can simply buy the cheapest part, the rest of the prices are included for completeness sake). But anyways, the analysis
- Comparing Configuration 1 to Configuration 3, the latter costs an extra $85 so it would seem that the SLI route is more cost effective -- until we realize that the 7800GT will more than outright destroy a 6600GT-SLI configuration. A quick Googling of the relevant benchmarks will quickly confirm this. As a quick proof, consider Doom3 UQ @ 1600x1200
- Comparing Configuration 2 to Configuration 4, the latter turns out to be cheaper and you'll also see that the 7800GT will outperform 6800GT-SLI (although the margin of victory is, as expected, significantly less). Again, Google up some benchmarks for yourself but as a quick example, consider FarCry UQ @ 1600x1200 or FEAR @ 1600x1200
Also note that the above non-SLI configurations do not take into consideration any resale value of the originally purchased cards. We're not done with the analysis quite yet: consider that in a span of a few months that if the video subsystem is obsolete enough to warrant a multiGPU configuration then one has to wonder how obsolete the memory and processing subsystems are. Granted the majority of the burden is on the GPU but one cannot deny the impact of the RAM/CPU -- adding a second videocard to the system will improve performance no doubt but putting all that money into the videosubsystem when the CPU/RAM is the bottleneck does not seem like a wise move.

Now as a final statement, if you can afford a multiGPU configuration .. by all means, go for it, there ARE gains in both performance and image quality however for someone who is honestly asking "should I?", they will most likely be better served by the normal upgrade route.
AGP or PCI-Express?
A somewhat difficult question as it depends a lot on the amount of money you have to play, how much you want to upgrade and when you plan to move onto the next upgrade. Some considerations
- AGP is essentially dead. Although AGP cards can stil be bought, quantity and availabilty will be limited; due to how the economy works, the pricing for AGP cards will also be higher.
- Since AGP is effectively dead, buying an AGP card would be an investment that will not take you anywhere past the current hardware. While this is ok for people who are looking to build a basic machine, users who are looking at Category C and Category D might be better off moving the entire upgrade along into a platform change.
- The reason budget is an issue is, well, if you want to avoid investing into a dead platform, you're going to have to buy, at the least, a new motherboard (i.e., Athlon64 using a K8T800Pro ) or at the worst, a motherboard, CPU and RAM (a Pentium4 usign a P4C800). For all intents and purposes this is essentially akin to building a whole new computer.

02-26-2006, 03:01 PM	#9 (permalink)
Praetor Administrator Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Canada Age: 25 Posts: 19,954	Section 04 - VFAQ *How much can I overclock my videocard to?Nobody can tell you. Just because one dude hits a certain clock speed doesnt mean you will either, you may match that, surpass it or come up dismally short. The only way to find out how much you can overclock your videocard by is to try it out yourself If I overclock my videocard, how much performance increase should I expect?Depends on the card, what you are overclocking and how much you are overclocking it by! As a trend, nVidia based cards seem to benifit more per clock cycle When overclocking you have the option of overclocking the coreclock, the memory clock or both. Depending on how what you are using to measure performance you will notice varying changes in performance depending on which you overclock Overclocking a GPU core by 10MHz wont produce anything noticeble; neither will overclocking the memory by 25MHz. Also something to consider: a videocard which uses a 128bit memory path will benifit less from each memory clock increase than on that uses a 256bit memory interface Overclocking a low end budget card in hopes of making it perform like a high end part will only result in failure, dissapointment and/or naivete. People who say they've overclock their budget gaming card by # percent and have gotten like twice the performance generally dont know what they are talking about. The reason (yes there is a reason) is that the bottleneck with budget parts is usually not the clock speed but something more crucial like the number of pipelines or the memory addressing bus width -- neither of which are affected by overclocking Some GPUs have frequency scaling where you wont notice any performance gains until you've overclocked by certain amounts. A bit is mentioned here* *I've not bought a videocard yet but when I do, I want to overclock it, what should I look for when buying one?* Either look for non-standard cooler (whether it be copper based, uses some form of exhaust or something else) or consider buying an aftermarket cooler. Increasing the cooling capacity (especially for the memory units) will help to improve the amount you can overclock by (why? because if the card, or some of its components, overheats then it may throttle itself and/or artifacts/corruption will show up). While cooling is only half the battle, it's a fairly easy thing to look after. *What brand should I buy?* The general answer is, "if you're asking this then you probably wont notice all that much" The reasoning is that serious overclockers/performance nuts will have done their research and everybody else probably wont be pushing their hardware enough to notice any difference between brands etc. Now to actually answer the question, a "better" brand depends on how you define "better". Here are some scenarios BFG generally sells their cards as overclocked out of the box. Geneally speaking it's an insignificant overclock however people see the words "overclocked" and are willing to shell out money for it. Lucky BFG. BFG parts are generally very well made however there is a premium involved for their parts being "overclocked" ASUS products are generally very well made however they make a very wide variety of products catering to budget users (-X series) to the top (-TOP, EXTREME series) tier users so to group all ASUS products into one specific description is generally unfair. It is fair to say their products are generally very well made however they tend to do "wierd things" (i.e., power connectors on ASUS video cards arent standard etc). As a trend, ASUS parts are usually more expensive as well -- often worth it -- but expensive nonetheless XFX. What sets XFX apart from the rest (other than a difficult to open product box) is their product warranty is single-sale transferable (i.e., if you bought the card originally, you can sell the card and the next owner is entitled to the warranty as well) as well as their cards being usually overclocked a bit. Their pricing is pretty in line with their performance eVGA. Their selling point is an obscenely comprehensive warranty. Short of blatant damage to the card, it's covered. Naturally you need to read more into this before running off an buying a random eVGA card. HIS/Sapphire/Powercolor/Connect3D. These companies often make ship cards with some form of custom cooler which adds to the value of the card by reducing temperatures and improving overclockability Other..... read up on the company and see for yourself! *Should I get SLI/Crossfire?* If you're asking this, the answer is "no". People who will benifit from this neat (and expensive) technological marvel have already made up their minds and bought the hardware for it. If you're asking about whether you should get it or not then you've not maximized your hardware enough to benifit from it (i.e., sort of how people who havnt quite learned how to use a basic calculator ... they shouldnt be messing with a graphing calculator quite yet). Now for a technical reason as to why one shouldnt go the multi-GPU route: consider the following scenarios Dude is looking to buy a SLI-capable machine with a not-quite-top-of-the-line videocard and buying the second video card a few months later. Lets have a financial analysis Popular SLI Motherboards ... [Min, Avg, Max] = [125,161,205] - MSI K8N Neo4 SLI ... Sep 05 @ 125USD - DFI Lanparty UT NF4 SLI-DR ... Sep 05 @ 165USD - Abit Fatal1ty AN8 SLI ... Sep 05 @ 205USD - ASUS A8N-SLI Premium ... Sep 05 @ 175USD - Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI ... Sep 05 @ 135USD Popular Non-SLI Motherboards ... [Min, Avg, Max] = [110,118,130] - Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9 ... Sep 05 @ 115USD - DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D ... Sep 05 @ 130USD - ASUS A8N-E ... Sep 05 @ 110USD - Abit AN8 Ultra ... Sep 05 @ 115USD - MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum ... Sep 05 @ 120USD Popular 6600GTs - PNY GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 220USD, Feb 06 @ 150USD - BFS GeForce 6600GT OC 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 190USD, Feb 06 @ 200USD - Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 175USD, Feb 06 @ 150USD - ASUS GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 185USD, Feb 06 @ 155USD - XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 145USD, Feb 06 @ 120USD - Chaintech GeForce 6600GT 128MB ... Sep 05 @ 140USD, Feb 06 @ 125USD Popular 6800GTs - BFG GeForce 6800GT OC 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 320USD, Feb 06 @ 385USD - MSI GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 325USD, Feb 06 @ 315USD - Gigabyte GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 380USD, Feb 06 @ 380USD - Leadtek GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 300USD, Feb 06 @ 300USD - XFX GeForce 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 290USD, Feb 06 @ 300USD - eVGA 6800GT 256MB ... Sep 05 @ 290USD, Feb 06 @ 325USD Some Current Cards - Gigabyte 7800GT 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 295USD - MSI GeForce 7800GT 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 265USD - eVGA GeForce 7800GT 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 275USD - BFG GeForce 7800GT OC 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 315USD - eVGA GeForce 7800GT CO SE 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 260USD - XFX GeForce 7800GTX 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 470USD - MSI GeForce 7800GTX 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 435USD - eVGA GeForce 7800GTX ACS3 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 435USD - ASUS Radeon X1800XL 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 355USD - Sapphire Radeon X1800XL 256MB ... Feb 06 @ $340USD - Connect3D Radeon X1800XL 256MB ... Feb 06 @ 320USD - MSI Radeon X1800XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 400USD - Gigabyte Radeon X1800XT 512MB .. Feb 06 @ 395USD - MSI Radeon X1900XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 530USD - Powercolor Radeon X1900XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 480USD - Connect3D Radeon X1900XT 512MB ... Feb 06 @ 510USD Ok now that we have some figures lets do some math.... Configuration 1: 6600GT-SLI ... SLI Motherboard (160USD) + Sep 05 6600GT (175USD) + Feb 06 6600GT (150USD) ... 485USD Configuration 2: 6800GT-SLI ... SLI Motherboard (160USD} + Sep 05 6800GT (320USD) + Feb 06 6800GT (330USD) ... 810USD Configuration 3: 6600GT -> 7800GT ... NonSLI Motherboard (118USD) + Sep 05 6600GT (175USD) + Feb 06 7800GT (260) ... 553USD Configuration 4: 6800GT --> 7800GT ... NonSLI Motherboard (118USD) + Sep 05 6800GT (320USD) + Feb 06 7800GT (260) ... 698USD Analysis Ive provided a whole bunch of number that you can use to make your own comparisons and calculations (note that for the 7800GT I chose the cheapest part ... the reasoning is, because we are not forced to pick a specific part then we can simply buy the cheapest part, the rest of the prices are included for completeness sake). But anyways, the analysis Comparing Configuration 1 to Configuration 3, the latter costs an extra $85 so it would seem that the SLI route is more cost effective -- until we realize that the 7800GT will more than outright destroy a 6600GT-SLI configuration. A quick Googling of the relevant benchmarks will quickly confirm this. As a quick proof, consider Doom3 UQ @ 1600x1200 Comparing Configuration 2 to Configuration 4, the latter turns out to be cheaper and you'll also see that the 7800GT will outperform 6800GT-SLI (although the margin of victory is, as expected, significantly less). Again, Google up some benchmarks for yourself but as a quick example, consider FarCry UQ @ 1600x1200 or FEAR @ 1600x1200 Also note that the above non-SLI configurations do not take into consideration any resale value of the originally purchased cards. We're not done with the analysis quite yet: consider that in a span of a few months that if the video subsystem is obsolete enough to warrant a multiGPU configuration then one has to wonder how obsolete the memory and processing subsystems are. Granted the majority of the burden is on the GPU but one cannot deny the impact of the RAM/CPU -- adding a second videocard to the system will improve performance no doubt but putting all that money into the videosubsystem when the CPU/RAM is the bottleneck does not seem like a wise move. Now as a final statement, if you can afford a multiGPU configuration .. by all means, go for it, there ARE gains in both performance and image quality however for someone who is honestly asking "should I?", they will most likely be better served by the normal upgrade route. *AGP or PCI-Express?* A somewhat difficult question as it depends a lot on the amount of money you have to play, how much you want to upgrade and when you plan to move onto the next upgrade. Some considerations AGP is essentially dead. Although AGP cards can stil be bought, quantity and availabilty will be limited; due to how the economy works, the pricing for AGP cards will also be higher. Since AGP is effectively dead, buying an AGP card would be an investment that will not take you anywhere past the current hardware. While this is ok for people who are looking to build a basic machine, users who are looking at Category C and Category D might be better off moving the entire upgrade along into a platform change. The reason budget is an issue is, well, if you want to avoid investing into a dead platform, you're going to have to buy, at the least, a new motherboard (i.e., Athlon64 using a K8T800Pro ) or at the worst, a motherboard, CPU and RAM (a Pentium4 usign a P4C800). For all intents and purposes this is essentially akin to building a whole new computer. __________________ ASUS P5K Premium WiFi-AP, Q6600@3.7 / ASUS P5ND, E6400@3.8 4GB OCz Platinum XTC 8500 / 4GB CorsairXMS2 6400 5x500GB Seagate 7200.10 / 2x500 Seagate 7200.10 OCz 8800GTX 768MB @ 630/800 / 2x Galaxy 8800GT SLI Last edited by Praetor; 02-26-2006 at 03:21 PM.