6800 GT Issue

[sideeffect]

Hi guys. I have a 6800 GT made by leadtek i have it clocked at 420 core and 1100 memory for 24/7 usage and its fine. I was hoping for more though.

It has the nice Leadtek cooling on it but i took off the plastic shroud and the small fan and attached a 120 mm fan. I get about 45 degrees idle and 55 degrees load temp.

Ive reached the max core speed that this voltage will allow me so i flashed the bios to 1.4 volts but i get screen coruption in a game. Game just freezes picture is all garbled and i have to reboot machine.

So far ive tried the power lead mod where you use 2 x 12 volt and 2 x 5 volt leads from different power lines going into one molex to stabilise the power. That didnt help at all. I then tried using a different power supply to suplly power to the molex. That also didnt help. I also tried vagp voltage from 1.5 volts to 1.8 volts that didnt help either.

Im back at 1.3 volts now but a little confused as to what the problem could be. Im also a little gutted because i have a vapochill PE here that i was going to mount on the card to overclock it some. If it wont even handle 1.4 volts though i dont see the point in that.

Any ideas -sollutions?

Edit - My main power supply is a Enermax 460 watt with 33A on the 12volt rail. Backup power supply is enermax 430 watt with 33A on 12 volt rail.

Edit 2 - my vapochill is off atm the main power supply is poweing the motherboard, cpu, graphics card 2 hard drives and a dvd drive. When i use the vapochill i have it running on the other power supply and connect the dvd drive up to that as well and all the fans to that to. im pretty sure its not power related ....

[Nanometer]

Not all bioses have good performance, try others. I've used some that could get me up to 600 mhz core, and others barilly over 500 with the same volts. Enjoy.

[sideeffect]

K thanks ill try some other bios files see what happens. Im also trying the original bios but upping 0.01 volts at a time to try and find a point where it wont glitch and maybe give me a little more clocks.

[sideeffect]

Well i tried flashing a Ultra bios onto the card and it had the same problem would freeze in a game at high clocks with over 1.35 volts. So im back at default leadtek bios at 1.33 volts. Seems the most im going to get out of this card is 430 mhz .....

[Major_A]

I wouldn't be too bummed out about it, you are still faster than a 6800 Ultra.

[RPGWiZaRD]

My Leadtek PX6800 GT TDH (single slot fan version) I'm currently running 24/7 430/1150 with stock BIOS and volts 1.3 and I haven't tried going further yet... so far no signs or artifacts or instability tho. My temp are higher than urs tho but I did put an 80mm fan on the edge of it using the screwholes. Idle temp is about 60C and load 75C.

Also I discovered today that I had been running the fan at 50% speed all the time when I installed Rivatuner as I've never heard the gfx card fan noise b4 (even after hr+ of gaming) until now when I set it to 100%. Seems like this card I have doesn't adjust it automaticly depending on the core temp. Left it at 70% as that's about where u still won't hear it over the other fans. This made the temp in FarCry with maximum gfx quality settings drop from 78C to 74C for example.

[sideeffect]

Yes my stock bios limits fan to 53 percent even in performance mode. I took that off though i use a 120 mm fan attached to the heatsink. I made a little progress on my overclock. Now running at 435 mhz core and 1105 mhz memory at 1.33 volts get 5930 points on 3d mark 2005 no artifacts using ATI tool either.

Going to relax the memory timings next to get a few more mhz on the memory to see if it helps my score.

I think my error with freezing is to do with the voltage regulators. So my next mod will be to solder a new capicitor on the card. Once i get this card stable at 1.4 volts + ill attach the vapochill to it and see what it can do then.

[RPGWiZaRD]

Glad to hear that :woot:

I'm pretty happy with my 3DMark05 score... 6039 points is the record. That's with my 2.61GHz Sandy. But yet again that tells how gfx intense 3DMark is. I'm pretty happy with 430/1150 with stock BIOS, heatsink, volt, so I dun feel like I have to try going much further.

Here's a pic of my little extra gfx card cooling *cough cough*, 2x 120mm and 1x 80mm sitting directly on the card.

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/1198/hpim32601ep.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[sideeffect]

Well I improved my Overclock again seemed the memory was giving errors in ATI tools artifact scan at 1105 - 1110 for some reason so i thought that was the maximum then i tested higher and it went all the way up to 1170mhz.

1170 crashed 3dmark 2005 though so i settled on 1150 mhz. Got the core up slightly to 436 mhz at 1.33 volts :p: Passes artifact scan for ages at this setting so going to keep it 24 / 7. Improved my 3dmark score to 6042 though :woot:

I think in 3Dmark 2007 they should add a artifact test to the benchmark so when you compare results you can see if the card was properly stable that your comparing against.

[16floz470ml]

I have a pny 6800gt that runs 430 1130 24/7. I tried to flash the bios to 1.4 and had the exact same results as you. I have also seen other people that have had a lot of overclocking success with 1.4 volts. I have no explanation. It must be what brand you have.