Graphic Card Overclocking/Voltage

laxie

I've been having problems with my nvidia card lately, especially on games that are graphically demanding. My games freeze, the graphic driver crashes every now and then.

I have tried updating the software side of things, but it doesn't help. Searching the forums, I found out people have similar problems, saying it happens when the GPU comes overclocked from the factory.

People suggested that increasing the voltage input into the card by a bit will improve the performance and remove my problems.

 

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with tempering with the GPU voltage intake / overclocking. Is it safe to do, does it void warranty? Have you had to do it at some stage? Is it possible that GPUs come from the factory in such a state that they are not optimised and crash?

 

Quizzical

Post your complete system specs so that we don't have to guess on what you have.  In particular, say exactly which power supply, motherboard, and case you have.  My guess is that the underlying problem is a heat or power issue, not the video card.

The way that computer chips work is that at a given clock speed and temperature, there is some minimum voltage that is needed to make the system stable.  If you go below that voltage, it crashes.  But you generally want the lowest stable voltage that you can, as power consumption is proportional to voltage squared, so adding voltage means a lot more heat--and at a higher temperature, you'd need even more voltage to make a given clock speed stable.  Higher voltages also mean far more stress on the chip, so you're a lot more likely to fry it.

Pynda

You could look at temperatures (and log them while you're playing) easily enough with some simple free software. The two that come to mind right off the bat are GPU-Z for the video card and Core Temp for the CPU(s).

GPU-Z would also tell if your video card is overclocked by comparing its various readouts to stock specs (which you could find at Wikipedia). I'd also suggest that if your video card is highly over volted/overclocked and is starting to fail - but still basically functions - a second option might be to slow it back down to default volts and clock cycles. Which may be better than upping the voltage and frying it altogether (you should find out what the tolerable limits of voltage and temperature are considered to be with various chips before you start screwing around with voltage settings).

If you want to test video stability, you might try OCCT Perastroika (the free version). Just make sure to let it install DirectX when you do first install it. It puts some extra features of DirectX on your computer that the standard version doesn't have. The nice thing about this program is that it actually logs errors textually. Whereas a lot of other graphics stability testing software just make you visually look for artifacts, etc..

Test general computer stability? Try running 'Prime95' blend test for maybe 12 hours. Or 'HCI Memtest' (the free Windows version is okay, it just takes longer to reveal a problem) for 12 hours if you suspect a system memory problem. GL.

Edit: err, and keep an eye on temperatures when you use stability testing software of whichever sort. These programs really tend to heat things up.