Vanilla 6600 overclock throttling?

[jhatfie]

I recently got a Asus N6600 (agp) to replace my old Geforce ti4200 in my backup rig. I got it for $125 so I figured it was priced to close to the 6200's to overlook the gauranteed 8 pipes.

Popped it in and used coolbits to find the optimal OC and it came back with 395/648. Figured that was a good start. Modded the bios to default clock at 400/600 and enabled the 6600gt temp trick. Pulled the very poorly finished gpu heatsink, gave it some AS5 attention and added some ramsinks for the DDR. After the attention coolbits reported the optimal OC as 405/655. Tested it here and it was stable with no artifacts. Loaded the Asus overclocking utility provided with the card because I wanted to see what it was about and it let me OC to 475/650 (max it would go). Tested here with no artifacts, but benchmark scores were the same as running 405/655 making me think that some throttling was going on. Temps were somewhat acceptable at 45C idle and 65C load (using temp graph in rivatuner). So I loaded rivatuner and OC'd using it disabling the thermal protection and internal clock test and what not. Pushed until I hit 525/725 and then got no artifacts, but started freezing in benchmarks. Dropped it back to 515/720 and all benchmarks ran flawless (7300 in 3dmark03, 3200 in 05).

My question is although there are no visable artifacts after gaming or benching, is that high a clock harmful since coolbits complains over 405/655 unless I use rivatuner to disable the thermal throttling?

[zakelwe]

I recently got a Asus N6600 (agp) to replace my old Geforce ti4200 in my backup rig. I got it for $125 so I figured it was priced to close to the 6200's to overlook the gauranteed 8 pipes.

Popped it in and used coolbits to find the optimal OC and it came back with 395/648. Figured that was a good start. Modded the bios to default clock at 400/600 and enabled the 6600gt temp trick. Pulled the very poorly finished gpu heatsink, gave it some AS5 attention and added some ramsinks for the DDR. After the attention coolbits reported the optimal OC as 405/655. Tested it here and it was stable with no artifacts. Loaded the Asus overclocking utility provided with the card because I wanted to see what it was about and it let me OC to 475/650 (max it would go). Tested here with no artifacts, but benchmark scores were the same as running 405/655 making me think that some throttling was going on. Temps were somewhat acceptable at 45C idle and 65C load (using temp graph in rivatuner). So I loaded rivatuner and OC'd using it disabling the thermal protection and internal clock test and what not. Pushed until I hit 525/725 and then got no artifacts, but started freezing in benchmarks. Dropped it back to 515/720 and all benchmarks ran flawless (7300 in 3dmark03, 3200 in 05).

My question is although there are no visable artifacts after gaming or benching, is that high a clock harmful since coolbits complains over 405/655 unless I use rivatuner to disable the thermal throttling?

I was using my 6600 two days ago with stock heatsink on it and it hit 92C in 2001 nature and the score was fine, so I doubt you are throttling at only 65C. It is more likely to do with simple overclock causing low scores. Certainly the freeze release can be down to memory overclock as well as gpu it seems nowadays, in the past your used to get bad traingular artifcats on memory, but this Hynix stuff seems to just cause freeze release.

Regards

Andy