- Joined
- Mar 21, 2006
- Location
- Eindhoven, The Netherlands
I have been out of the active overclocking game for a while now since I decided that my computer does not need an upgrade every 3 months.
Current specs in my sig are still pretty much accurate and I've been gaming on my GTX260 for quite some time now. Whilst it is a pretty decent card and still manages to play many of today's current games on medium/high settings, it is starting to show its limits (especially when NOT overclocked, although I do keep it at max stable OC almost all the time).
Currently thinking about either going for the AMD R9 270x or the HD7870(cheaper by 30 euro's). The 7950 is sold out everywhere and about 70 euro's more expensive than a HD7870 on the 2nd hand market.
Now from back in my days of overclocking, finding a max stable clock is what you did by pushing the hardware, testing stability and repeating that process until max clocks were found.
Voltmods were done either by means of a pencil mod, hard mod or softmod(if even possible) through a BIOS reflash (losing warranty in the process though).
My experience with current day overclocking programs such as MSI Afterburner and the likes is that you cannot go over a specific "safe" overclocking range and that range is determined by MSI (and in the case of my laptop set way too low). Appearantly you can also adjust the voltage on the fly but it would require "special" models of a card?
How is overclocking currently achieved? Still by some "locked" safe maximum setting?
Will be buying the card in 1,5 months and would like to be up to speed by that time to make an informed decision. I don't want a card that can barely go past stock clocks and is regulated with too many restrictions. They already started that trend way back with the intel 2xxx and 2xxxK processors and I would like to know if that stuff has caught on to video cards as well.
Current specs in my sig are still pretty much accurate and I've been gaming on my GTX260 for quite some time now. Whilst it is a pretty decent card and still manages to play many of today's current games on medium/high settings, it is starting to show its limits (especially when NOT overclocked, although I do keep it at max stable OC almost all the time).
Currently thinking about either going for the AMD R9 270x or the HD7870(cheaper by 30 euro's). The 7950 is sold out everywhere and about 70 euro's more expensive than a HD7870 on the 2nd hand market.
Now from back in my days of overclocking, finding a max stable clock is what you did by pushing the hardware, testing stability and repeating that process until max clocks were found.
Voltmods were done either by means of a pencil mod, hard mod or softmod(if even possible) through a BIOS reflash (losing warranty in the process though).
My experience with current day overclocking programs such as MSI Afterburner and the likes is that you cannot go over a specific "safe" overclocking range and that range is determined by MSI (and in the case of my laptop set way too low). Appearantly you can also adjust the voltage on the fly but it would require "special" models of a card?
How is overclocking currently achieved? Still by some "locked" safe maximum setting?
Will be buying the card in 1,5 months and would like to be up to speed by that time to make an informed decision. I don't want a card that can barely go past stock clocks and is regulated with too many restrictions. They already started that trend way back with the intel 2xxx and 2xxxK processors and I would like to know if that stuff has caught on to video cards as well.
