EVGA 9800 GT 512MB SC Memory OC?

Hi, so I have an EVGA 9800GT 512MB Superclocked, and I was newly OCing it with EVGA Precision. I've been using Furmark to test stability. I found that the core clock maxes out at 700 without artifacts with linked shader at 1750 just fine. However, I keep on raising the memory and have yet to come across any artifacts. It was default at 950, and I've since raised it to 1200 with no artifacts and running at 83C. Is this OK? Should I just keep on going until I get artifacts?

EDIT: After raising to 1520 just to see what would happen, the screen immediately went gray and the computer froze. Restarted and tried 1300, and after a minute or two of FurMark the computer froze with multicolored artifacts all over the screen. I'm running it at 1250 right now to see what will happen.

Also, I'm air cooling with the default heatsink and case fans on my Antec Three Hundred set to medium (except the one by the GPU which is on high).

Lucky you I can't take my memory over 900MHz, temps look ok. If I were you I would turn the fan speed up manually and see where the temps go.

thats a pretty ridiculous oc for a card that old. wow! if your gpu is idling at 83C thats a problem. If its full load at that then you are good although longevity starts to die at temps that high. up all ur fans, maybe add or switch out some fans too.

Well it auto set the fan up to around 75-80 and the temp maxed out at about 83C. Dunno if I really want to manually set it cause it would just be running even when I'm not really using it.

Bah, Chrome hates editing here. It actually only idles at about 55, under full load it maxes at 83 with 700 core/1750 shader/1250 memory.

That's with Furmark too which is going to be a lot hotter than any real application. If you're not hitting 100% fan speed it should be OK and will certainly be fine in real use, what you want to avoid is a runaway heating situation where the fan hits 100% but the temps keep rising anyway.

Alright cool, thanks man.

thats an incredible oc dude. glad to see temps are good. if you want to get better cooling adding fans couldn't hurt

Yeah, all the case fans are only set to medium though. I probably could turn them all up, but then it would get loud

What benefit do we get from overclocking the memory significantly? fps increase?

Try unlinking the core and shaders to max out each individually. You should be able to get higher on 1 or the other as opposed to keeping them linked.

It looks like you have Samsung RAM on your card. Some cards have Hynix RAM which doesn't OC nearly as well.

baris_ said:

What benefit do we get from overclocking the memory significantly? fps increase?

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It can increase fps if you are starved for RAM bandwidth. Seeing as how he has a 512MB DDR3 card w/ a 256-bit bus it can make quite a difference.

Is the 9800 GT any good for gaming?
Planning on getting one myself

Alright, some advice.

I have a gts 250 which is really similar to the 9800. If you're looking to get one for gaming, it's not the best, but if you're on a budget it will handle 90% of games out there on 1920x1080 screens, which is pretty darn good as far as im concerned.

For overclocking, i seem to have gotten a pretty good card. I'm at 820/1896/2620 stable under furmark. So there is a decent amount of overclocking potential for the 9800.

So basically if you have a tight budget, the 9800 will be good enough as long as you aren't an insane gamer, playing on 3 2500x1600 screens or something