• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

what happened to my x1900gt?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

striker85

Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2006
Location
Connecticut
As stated in the title, I have an x1900gt. It has been wonderful to me for a while, but now something has happened to it. You may have seen me post in a couple other sections in reference to this. So, back story:

I had this clocked at roughly 580/7(something) on stock cooling and volts. But I wanted to take it further since I thought this card had a lot more in it. So I found a nifty little volt mod. So now I have it running at 1.35v. With this I was able to get it to clock to 610/825 or so. But stock cooling was not enough for it and it was frequently peaking at 75~80c...unacceptable. So now I have it on a water loop with maze4 acetal top and a BIPII.

Ok, so that was awesome, it idles at ~33 and peaks at ~40 now. Water cooling rocks...yeah. But for some reason I am having problems with clocking it now. I can barely get past 580 on the core now. I don't get it, it seems to have clocked better with the stock cooler on it even though it was getting way hotter. I don't understand what happened. I haven't spilled any water on it.

One thing I did notice is that my PSU +12v rail was reading 11.88v in the BIOS. Is that enough of a drop to possibly effect my OC? My CPU and memory are OCed but a rock stable. Also, when I am trying to OC (using catalyst 7.3 drivers and ATItool) and it happens to crash because of me pushing the core clock higher, it does something weird. When I reset and Windows loads back up, I see the ATItool icon in the tray, like it is loading the driver....but it just sits there instead of loading and popping the temp up. Instead, it reboots, and reboots, and reboots. Not until I shut down completely and turn back on does it load Windows successfully. I'm starting to think it is a driver issue...


Any thoughts?
 
Did the stock cooler also cool the memory chips? The fan may also have had air running over the power area too.

Does that block only cool the gpu? or will it help cool the memory and power regs as well?

If not then the chances are by removing the stock cooler you are not getting enough cooling on the memory and power area.. With a volt mod especially you need to have extra cooling on the power area and memory.

11.88 on the 12v line is a little low for my taste. Others will say its fine but to me it isnt. The 12v should remain above 12 imo....
 
well, i have the memory and vregs sinked with a fan blowing across the card. The water block only cools the core.
 
Ok, so I'm still stumped. My system generally runs fine. I have the card overclocked to 587/828 and it runs fine in BF2142 and 3Dmark, etc. But when I load ATItool to do some overclock testing like artifact scanning...even when I just open the 3d fuzzy cube view, my computer resets. But with the same clocks, I can run other 3d apps just fine. Is this a driver issue? I've done a clean windows install not that long ago and have never fooled with drivers...7.3 cats with ATItool.
 
Back