How much of a difference in gaming performace would it make to overclock an Nvidia graphics card...?

Question

using the Nvidia control center.

PNY Nvidia Geforce 8600GT, GDDR 3, 512MB Ram

GPU Core Bus Speed: Stock 576 MHz; Custom OC'ed to 625 MHz

GPU Memory Bus Speed: 730 MHz: Custom OC'ed at 800 MHz

With those settings, I'm playing Crysis at Medium settings, and the highest the graphics card's temperature went was 72C; so those bus speeds are stable.

How much of an increase would one notice with that much increase in bus speeds?

Answer 1

Nothing to worry about. My 8600 GT could reach 79c during hot days and heavy load. 8600 GT, unlike their previous 8800 (not including 8800GT) are 65nm process. Reduction in fab usually means they can tolerate much higher temperature as compared to their earlier 80nm GPU.

Unless your game crash or you start to see abnormalities in your graphics during 3D game, there's nothing to worry about your temp.

From what I can tell, overclocking a 8600GT doesn't brings much difference, especially in normal gaming condition.

usually overclocking will only bring more noticable difference with higher end cards. This is because, well the maths here is simple.

Take memory for example.
8600GT has 128bits memory bus. 8800GTX has 384 bits memory bus. This is the amount of data transfered per clock cycle. That means for ever 1 Hz, 8600 GT moves 128bits of data, and 8800GTX can move 384bits of data.

Which then means increasing the frequency of a 8800GTX brings significantly more improvement as compared to 8600 GT. Lets say if you overclock both card memory by 500MHz extra.

8600GT - Extra bandwidth gain = 6.4Gbits per second
8800GTX - Extra bandwidth gain = 19.2Gbits per second

Obviously the 8800GTX will show much more noticable difference.

Same goes for core. 8600GT has only 32 SMP. 8800GTX has 128 SMP, so they yields more horsepower.

This is why for mid range cards, overclocking hardly brings much difference.

Answer 2

The NVIDA will unfastened-up any RAM that the intergrated Intel snap shots would have been be utilising out of your 4 GB finished. additionally that's going to be utilising cycles from its very own GPU and not utilising cycles out of your motherboards CPU. A committed video card will advance all overall performance somewhat. no longer all Video playing cards can cope with the Aero "eye-candy" in variants of Vista different than domicile consumer-friendly.

Answer 3

It depends on really, what you have and your setup. It can give a performance boost. But, i wouldn't say a great deal. It defineatly aint worth it, if its going to shorten the card's life. Just make sure you have good cooling. And dont over do it! Cuz you'll be forking out dough for new hardware!

Answer 4

Tom's Hardware had a nice article a couple weeks ago that might help. They got 5-10% frame rate increase by overclocking

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/23/overclock_your_graphics_card_in_five_minutes/

Answer 5

That card should run Crysis on high setting without any problems. You might get a few more FPS, but you will definitly get more heat.