7800GS + Thermalright V-1 Ultra?

[Strages]

I just received my XFX 7800GS EE and it's acting rather weird overclocked. I used the optimal clock feature of coolbits and it set the card to 490/1400 off the bat and I did some quick testing... it crashed 3DMark2001SE, ran through 3DMark05 just fine, and ran Oblivion for about 5-10 minutes before crashing. I'm not sure if it's even crashing though, the screen just goes black and my monitor light blinks, like what happens when the screensaver goes on - no reboot though, just goes black. Anyone have ideas as to what this could be?

On to the jist, anyone know if the V-1 Ultra has been tried on a 7800GS yet?? The compatibility page says that the HSI chip isn't covered in the cooling solution, but I'm thinking that maybe I can simply cover it with a heatsink like Mavryk did - anyone know if there is room for this with the 7800GS? I'm not sure how big the base would be. Any ideas are welcomed/

[Maviryk]

Don't overclock it, you'd be better off upgrading you CPU. 7800GS's don't O/C well.

[twoeyes]

sorry to say but it sounds like something is overheating :(

[Samurai Blade]

Don't overclock it, you'd be better off upgrading you CPU. 7800GS's don't O/C well

well thats not true for a start they do overclock well , it sounds more like you hit the voltage limit , most 7800gs's wont go past 485mhz (or around there) with out removing a resistor. mine ran fine at 480mhz with ram at 1500mhz just make sure theres a good airflow in system.
im aiming at getting 480mhz on my new one once it arrives and has bedded in
i managed to fit a zalman 700led to it but had to redrill mounting holes and aquire a hsi heatsink ment for the 6 series nvidias. it worked fine though.

the other possiblity is your cpu overclock is drawing power away from the agp slot so ya might need to increase the voltage supplied to the card at that speed
first off though try running it at 480/1400 , i had the exact same card and it ran fine. top temp i hit on the gpu was 77'c (used hmonitor log which is pretty acurate)

[Maviryk]

well thats not true for a start they do overclock well , it sounds more like you hit the voltage limit , most 7800gs's wont go past 485mhz (or around there) with out removing a resistor. mine ran fine at 480mhz with ram at 1500mhz just make sure theres a good airflow in system.
im aiming at getting 480mhz on my new one once it arrives and has bedded in
i managed to fit a zalman 700led to it but had to redrill mounting holes and aquire a hsi heatsink ment for the 6 series nvidias. it worked fine though.

the other possiblity is your cpu overclock is drawing power away from the agp slot so ya might need to increase the voltage supplied to the card at that speed
first off though try running it at 480/1400 , i had the exact same card and it ran fine. top temp i hit on the gpu was 77'c (used hmonitor log which is pretty acurate)

480MHz from 460MHz is not a good OC. The cores from these cards are ones that didn't make it as GTs and GTXs. As for the "resistor" mod, it's not for voltage, it's for current. Any voltage mods to the card can actually make it more unstable due to the rejected GT/GTX cores. The ram will handle to 1600MHz if you use Powerstrip instead of coolbits.

Run the card at stock and just be glad you didn't get the bad batch of cores that the initial 7800GS owners had (their cores had to be UNDERCLOCKED to run stable). What you're getting is normal of overclocked GS's. Mine is on water (core on water, HSI with a PCI Slot blower sucking air off of it) and it gets the same problem when I try to run WoW or BF2 for 10 minutes. If you listen closely to your card you'll actually hear the coils chirping during high overclocks and 100% usage.

3dMark05 is not a good stability test program. Use BF2, WoW, or as you found out, Oblivion. Nvidia (and ATI also) has their drivers optimized for 3dMark so it's not as good a stability indicater as actual games.

I will agree with bumping up the AGP VDDQ voltage for you mobo will increase stability though.

The 7800GS doesn't have cooling problems, it has less than quality cores, and a poor design for feeding power to the chips. It's still a great card mind you, just not all that inclined towards OCing.

[DaBigJ]

The Nvidia spec for the 7800gs is 375 mhz for the core, I believe. Most manufacturers are selling them clocked at 420-460 mhz.

What you call a good overclock is relative to what you call the stock speed.


here's evga's "plain old" 7800gs: http://evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=256-A8-N505-AX&family=22

[Maviryk]

Stock is what I call the speed it is set as when bought.

It's not like Nvidia would set spec clocks lower so that the distributors can OC them straight from the factory and slap that big "Overclocked/Superclocked" label on them that gets them more profit, or anything like that.

[DaBigJ]

If you buy the plain 7800gs it will probably overclock fairly well. The "Superclocked" version doesn't OC very much. How strange.

[Strages]

hmm, I did hear a really annoying high-pitched sound coming from my system after installing the card, though I've never heard caps chirp like that so I didn't realize that's what it could have been. It makes sense that it's a poewr problem because no game I was using was artifacting or bliping or anything, so I was thinking it must be stable (until it shut off of course). I'd rather push the ram anyway, makes a bigger difference most of the time.

On the CPU front, I'm not really not hot on upgrading at this point. 1) I don't have the money and 2) this card was purchased as an alternative to upgrading now and will hold me over until vista, at which time it will be a better time to upgrade as newer, better, vista hardware will be out whereas I'd be stuck with something that won't be good for vista if I upgrade now. Plus I'll have more money then :).