[z4n3]

I recently bought a ZOTAC GeForce 8800GT 512MB and had a question about overclocking it. So its core clock is 660 mhz vs the standard 600 mhz. Does this mean that I can't, or should not overclock this card further? Or does this mean I can overclock it as if this is its baseline, to say 690 or 700?

[Drinkyoghurt]

first of all,

well it all depends, i'd leave it at those speeds for normal gaming, but for benchmarks i'd up it(and with good cooling they can reach at around 750/2000)

[PhysX]

should get atleast 685-690 out of the core, mem probably 970 easy, stream probably 1775

[Sentential]

Originally Posted by z4n3

I recently bought a ZOTAC GeForce 8800GT 512MB and had a question about overclocking it. So its core clock is 660 mhz vs the standard 600 mhz. Does this mean that I can't, or should not overclock this card further? Or does this mean I can overclock it as if this is its baseline, to say 690 or 700?

Video cards break down into two catagories: reference and non-reference. This terminology applies both to its physical appearence (the printed PCB) as well as any sort of changes in clocks / hardware (more ram/faster ram).

That being said you most likely have a reference 8800gt with non-reference clocks. In otherwords they pre-overclocked the card which may or may not be an indication that the card is of a higher quality. In your case it is not since that clock speed is well within the normalized average for that video card at default voltage.

So the next question is this: For a reference 8800GT what is the average overclock?

Anwser: Between 680 and 750 mhz for the GPU and between 900mhz - 975mhz on the RAM.

Clearly you have quite a bit more to go on both so yes you can certinaly overclock your card much higher than it is now. How far you go depends on the quality of the silicon used in your card, almost like what you would see in jewelery. Because of this the first thing I want to stress is that the amount of overclock you get has almost nothing to do with your level of skill, instead it is completly dependant on the physical quality of the hardware you use. So if your results are lackluster or not what you had hoped for it does not mean you are doing something wrong, it simply means you got a poor quality card.

[Neural Net]

I have a Zotac 8800GT and it can be temperamental. I'd also advise clocking the shaders higher as your main priority, benchmarks have shown that to be the most important component to overclock to gain more performance (but of course you will gain from OCing the GPU and memory as well).

I've had it at 700Mhz/1850Mhz and 950Mhz (GPU, Shader, and memory) and it has benched fine at those speeds and played games, but it did start to artifact after a several hours of UT3 (temps around 75 degrees).

Interestingly drivers seem to have a huge impact on the OC potential - the latest betas allow for high clocking but aren't too stable (the display driver would freeze and restart but the games wouldn't crash). The latest proper driver is pretty good and allows for some nice clocks, but I feel the drivers haven't quite matured yet with the G92 GPU.