Successful GTX 260 Overclock

Hey guys I have a pair of core 216 GTX 260s running in SLI, and I've just finished overclocking them... I was wondering if there are any other people out there with the 260 that could compare their max stable OCs with what I managed? I just want to get an idea of whether or not its a respectable OC

For the record the stock frequencies of the GTX 260s are:

Core Clock: 576 MHz
Shader Clock: 1242 MHz
Memory Clock: 999 MHz

And after overclocking:

Core Clock: 730 MHz
Shader Clock: 1574 MHz
Memory Clock: 1265 MHz

Fans are at 70% and temps in either card don't exceed 65 degrees after 1 hour of Crysis on ultra high settings.

Ill try to dig up a link later today when I get home from work... Those numbers seem the same as others have gotten aswell.... I think the 260 can overclock enough to be slightly less then a 275 or 85. My old one only got a 700mhz core clock so you beat me there.

That about what my GTX 260 core 216's topped out at, since putting them in tri SLI though i had to bring them back down a bit to 680/1454/2200

That overclock is around a stock 285, nice! Now you just need to OC your i7...

dgb303 said:

That overclock is around a stock 285, nice! Now you just need to OC your i7...

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How does that look?

Idle Temps of 38C and runs under full load at 68C... ^_^

B-B-BALLIN! Great work man!

Shadowmonk said:

That about what my GTX 260 core 216's topped out at, since putting them in tri SLI though i had to bring them back down a bit to 680/1454/2200

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Yeah SLI can get a bit messy when overclocking... plus the extra heat is definitely noticeable...

dgb303 said:

B-B-BALLIN! Great work man!

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Thanks.. in all honesty this is my first overclocked computer so I'm pretty happy with the results... plus synthetic bench was pretty sweet @ just about 26.5k 3DMarks..

Heres mine:

And its stable at this clock

I wish I could get mine that high....
any links on getting this thing to the best OC, mine is at 670/1463/1111 and anything above that its starts artifacting.

kellygtp said:

I wish I could get mine that high....
any links on getting this thing to the best OC, mine is at 670/1463/1111 and anything above that its starts artifacting.

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Have you got the core 216 or the older core 192 gtx 260? Because from what I understand the older cards are harder to overclock...

d4rkst4r said:

Have you got the core 216 or the older core 192 gtx 260? Because from what I understand the older cards are harder to overclock...

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core 216 55nm chip

kellygtp said:

core 216 55nm chip

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Well I had the same problem at first, but it turns out that my cards were not getting enough airflow in my case and I had to do some cable management to clear a path to the GPU fans... now they run pretty cool and I managed to get that OC..

I have EVGA cards so i used precision tweaker.. for some reason my nvidia system tools won't let me increase my core speed past 675, claiming that any higher value is invalid? lol... I would say make sure your card is running cool, ramp the fans to 100% and go for it.. I started with the memory clock first, then moved to the core clock.. and I just let the shaders scale with the core clock. Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but most of the guides I've seen give more or less only basic level overclocking help...

Wow nice clocks on those cards. What are you using for testing the stability of the gpu overclocks?
Are you playing any games with this rig? Just curious. How are they running? Which games?

Not bad at all. You can see my max benchable in sig, though that is with volt mods.

Bon3thugz43v3r said:

Wow nice clocks on those cards. What are you using for testing the stability of the gpu overclocks?
Are you playing any games with this rig? Just curious. How are they running? Which games?

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To test the stability of the cards during overclocking I just ran a GPU test from 3dMark06 (Canyon Flight), since it's a fixed loop it's relatively easy to notice any artifacting, however small.. After I reached the max stable point for both the memory and core clocks, I played Crysis for a solid hour to make sure temps stayed reasonable and that it was stable enough.. I've been gaming at those settings for a while now and everything seems to be working fine..

I've been playing Borderlands, Crysis, Far Cry 2, MWF2 and a few other games and they all work fine.. All those games except for Crysis run at extremely high fps with all settings max including AA, but I have to enable vsync because my HDTV has a crappy refresh rate and i get pretty bad screen tearing if I don't enable it... so I have them limited to only 60 fps.. I can run Crysis at 1920x1080, 16xQ and Ultra High at about 40-60 fps, but the refresh rate in 1080p is only 24 Hz LOL so i just dropped the resolution down to 1360x768, which I can run at 60 fps with no problem...

The one thing I did notice for crysis was when i overclocked my CPU the frames jumped quite a bit, it raised the average frames I was getting by about 8.. And the rig scored 26,500 on 3dmark06 for the record.

EarthDog said:

Not bad at all. You can see my max benchable in sig, though that is with volt mods.

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Yikes, those are some pretty high clocks you've got going on there o.o

I'm still an amateur when it comes to overclocking, so I wouldn't really feel comfortable messing with the voltage settings on my cards.. plus they perform so well in SLI that I figured there's no real need to go that far for my needs at least ... I assume that H2O next to the cards means you're running water cooling.. what sort of setup are you using for the 260s? and what sort of temps do they run at?

You can see the h20 setup in my sig as well.

The voltage bump was done via the bios. I flashed it to another version with higher volts.

The 260 idles at 32C and loads no more than 42C.

EarthDog said:

You can see the h20 setup in my sig as well.

The voltage bump was done via the bios. I flashed it to another version with higher volts.

The 260 idles at 32C and loads no more than 42C.

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Wow nice, I wish my card stayed that cool. My load reaches 80 at times and my idle is 55.... Your 800+ clock speeds should be performing close to a 295 though right?