8800gt superclocked: does it need extra cooling?

[opium of the people]

8800gt superclocked: does it need extra cooling?

hi, i am fairly new to upgrading pc's and i am thinking of updating my graphics card.
My current setup is a athlon x2 6000+, ati 2600xt, 2gig ram, vista32, standard mobo and a standard dell fan.

i was wondering whether or not i would have to get extra cooling if i were to get the superclocked/regular 8800gt?

help would be awesome

 

[Logan Westbrook]

If it's been overclocked in the factory, it'll come with fans built in, but like memory, extra cooling never hurts.

 

[opium of the people]

cool thanks, would you have any suggestions as to which fan/heatsink would be best?

(i've been told dell builds to a reasonable standard so the fan should not be so much of an issue?)

 

[Joeshie]

I get the feeling from your post that you aren't quite knowledgeable on overclocking.

With overclocking, there really is no "on/off switch". Generally, you slightly increase the speed of your GPU/CPU/whatever and then make sure nothing like artifacts occur, which would indicate that it's overheating. You have to find the sweet spot of how hard you can push your overclocked hardware yourself, which is completely based upon your model and how well you can keep the thing cool.

I would highly suggest you look at overclocking websites and forums to get a feel of overclocking. Also, you usually can look up your model on overclocking websites which will tell you generally how hard you can push your specific model. You should check out the bottom of the wikipedia article on overclocking which has links to guides and websites dedicated to overclocking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking

 

[cleverlymadeup]

yeah extra cooling can never hurt, you can never cool your chip or vid card too much, well with what you can get at the store at least

 

[mwhite67]

I want to make a waterproof PC thats suspended inside a tank of liquid. Why hasn't anyone done that yet?

 

[opium of the people]

thanks for all the help!!

 

[KamikazeSailor]

Be careful with overclocking, if you're new to it you could seriously fuck up your stuff man...

 

[TheIceface]

People generally throw around words like "overclocking" and "hacking" without much understanding as to how mundane, and often unnecessary, the processes are.

Heres the facts, you don't need to overclock your PC or video cards, or microwave, or anything like that. If you want to brag about how 1337 your OC'd PC is, do it, otherwise play it safe, get 2 8800gt cards and run a dual card config (I use a dual 8600 SLI setup myself). Way faster and safer than overclocking one card, you can cause some serious damage if you try to overclock things even if you understand them fairly well.

Also, ditch Vista, even if a miracle happens and some day it doesn't totally suck, its way too unstable at this point. Stick with XP 32 bit, service pack 3 just came out, so its not totally rotten like it used to be back when they still offered support for 2k.

 

[TheIceface]

I want to make a waterproof PC thats suspended inside a tank of liquid. Why hasn't anyone done that yet?

Its been done, mostly people use oil, I remember one guy running a PC in vegetable oil and cooking some tater tots in the same oil at the same time.

Check out this site, they have a PC in mineral oil and it runs just fine.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

 

[00exmachina]

http://www.tomshardware.com/liquid-nitrogen-overclock,video-268.html

There was also one that overclocked a 486 to about 1 ghz but it used 5 gallons of some kind non conductive insulating liquid then submerged the entire board and hard drives. and covered it in liquid nitrogen, but I can't find the video. I'm pretty sure it wasn't mineral oil because it boiled off once the cooling liquid was gone.

 

[ReepNeep]

People generally throw around words like "overclocking" and "hacking" without much understanding as to how mundane, and often unnecessary, the processes are.

I generally agree, unless you are talking about a Core 2 derived processor. Those things can routinely add 30% to their clock speed with no ill effects with the stock heatsink. They are drastically underclocked by default. Given how fast the prices on Intel processors ramp up as clock speed increases, you can save hundreds of dollars this way with very little risk.

Heres the facts, you don't need to overclock your PC or video cards, or microwave, or anything like that. If you want to brag about how 1337 your OC'd PC is, do it, otherwise play it safe, get 2 8800gt cards and run a dual card config (I use a dual 8600 SLI setup myself). Way faster and safer than overclocking one card, you can cause some serious damage if you try to overclock things even if you understand them fairly well.

... and way more expensive. You have to pay for a second video card, as well as adding at least 50$ to the cost of the motherboard. You also have to use a buggy Nvidia motherboard if you want to use SLI. Then theres the power reqirements which translate to bigger electric bills. And the fact that two cards never, even on their best day, run more than 50% faster than a single card. It is much more cost effective to buy a faster single card. The only thing SLI is really good for is driving those huge LCDs at their native resolution and at that point we can assume that money isn't an issue.

Granted, OCing a video card without using a waterblock and voltmodding the thing will usually net you around an extra 5% performance, a figure so small you would be hard pressed to even notice.

Also, ditch Vista, even if a miracle happens and some day it doesn't totally suck, its way too unstable at this point. Stick with XP 32 bit, service pack 3 just came out, so its not totally rotten like it used to be back when they still offered support for 2k.

If you have a dual core and at least 2gb of ram, Vista runs fine at this point. If Vista has at least that level of hardware, it runs programs just as fast as XP at this point. I'm only still using XP because I see no need to shell out more money. Nvidia even got around to writing functional drivers for the thing as well. Only took them a year, right?

Anyway, to the OP:
The card you are talking about is factory overclocked, yes? If so, you can trust the HSF thats already on it as long as you don't start fiddling with the clock speeds yourself.

They only thing you have to worry about is case ventilation, but if you have a 6000+ in there you probably have enough fans to begin with as those things run HOT.

 

[TheIceface]

... and way more expensive. You have to pay for a second video card, as well as adding at least 50$ to the cost of the motherboard. You also have to use a buggy Nvidia motherboard if you want to use SLI. Then theres the power reqirements which translate to bigger electric bills. And the fact that two cards never, even on their best day, run more than 50% faster than a single card.

Heh heh, yeah, I guess the electric bill might go up, but realistically speaking, its not equivalent to anything substantial, like running an AC unit on 40 degrees for 10 hours.

As for the speed, I'm not sure if I misunderstood what you were trying to get across, but I can assure you that 2 videos cards run at a considerably faster speed than just one of the same type. I think what you might have meant was having 2 video cards doesn't mean twice the power, usually it means anywhere from 150% to 180% the power of the single card. Just like multiple CPUs you don't get 100% usage when you have multiple devices competing to do the same thing.

I"m not going to try to save Nvidia by saying the cliched "I've never had a problem with it." that most people say about whatever they're defending. If Nvidia boards do present an issue, you may be better off not using them, but weighing the common MB difficulties with the handy SLI feature can warrant using them anyway. Any type of motherboard will have its problems, just different ones.

If you have a dual core and at least 2gb of ram, Vista runs fine at this point. If Vista has at least that level of hardware, it runs programs just as fast as XP at this point.

Its not the speed of the OS I'm talking about. Vista is extremely unreliable, it was released premature, an annoying trend Microsoft enjoys, and still lacks oodles of compatibility with drivers and other things. Many games and programs you may enjoy wont even run on that OS unless they've been released fairly recently, and even then its a gamble. Plus, if you intend to do anything that requires creativity or thinking out of the box, like non-factory overclocking, or anything interesting, don't count on it working very well, if at all, with Vista.

I've been through tons of OS setups, from win 3.1 to Win XP64 (bad Idea) and I've even had to deal with Vista a bit (I'd never install that garbage on my own computer though.) Right now your best choice is to go with WinXP 32 bit, its stable, lots of support, lots of compatibility, and all the drivers you'll ever need.

 

[Blayze]

Vista's a gamble at best. One friend of mine's had nothing but good luck with the thing. Another's had nothing but bad luck. A third's been 50/50 with it. Myself? It's been bad all the way. I've never had so many BSoDs in my life, and it's the first time Windows Update has ever killed an install so completely that nothing could recover it.

By contrast, I've had nothing but good experiences with XP 32-bit. I recently upgraded from Vista to XP 64-bit and it's been touch-and-go. If it wasn't for the fact that I *want* to make use of all of my RAM, I'd return to 32-bit XP in a *heartbeat*.

 

[ReepNeep]

TheIceFace's words here.

Oddly enough I have had much better experiences with Via boards than Nvidia ones. I'm not even talking about the apparently awful nForce 6 Intel boards here, just a supposedly solid nForce 4 thats in my 939 Athlon X2 right now. *shrugs*

This is genuine curiosity in case I come off as snarky: Where did you get that 180% figure? Nothing in my experience has come anywhere near that, and I've never seen benchmarks get that high either. The games that scale best with multiple cards generally come out at around 50%, with large numbers of them at 20% or lower. Some even get less performance from an extra card. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that at a given price point, buying a faster single card will get you more performance than using two (or more) cheaper ones largely because of the scaling issues.