Planning to WC an 8800GTX... buy basic model or factory OC'd?

[virtualrain]

As the title suggests, I'm buying an 8800GTX for my new rig and will water cool it with MCW-60 and ram sinks.

The question is, will the basic GTX provide as much overclocking potential compared to a factory overclocked card? The difference in price is about 10% which is nothing really, so I'm inclined to go for the higher binned part and see what more I can squeeze out of it. However, if people are consistently blowing the lid off even factory overclocks with a base-model card, perhaps it's a total waste of money?

What's your experience?

[Solarfall]

in my experience the regular cards will clock pretty much to same kind of speeds as the factory oced ones.. it's a marketing trick and nothing more that a cruel way to make you poor imo

[MrToad]

IMHO is just marketing.

Unless such "factory O/C-ed" card mounts specific components (better "hand picked" RAM chips, excelent quality batches of the GPU chip, better quality caps...) with higher voltage tolerance, and is indeed supplying that higher voltage to them, which is one of the biggest limiting factors when it comes to OC-ing a GPU, is just good old bs.

AFAIC what manufacturers do with such products is push the timings further than what the original guidelines dictate, but only so far so they are still confortable with giving the end user a guarantee with the product, and then put it in a fancy box.

The only advantage is that the O/C-ing won't void your warranty. But I think you'll do that yourself by removing he stock HS, so is a no win situation.

[Baleful]

Just get the regular one. With WCing they will clock just as good as the factory OCed ones.

[Gunslinger]

EVGA will still honor the warranty if you remove the stock HSF, personally I would buy the stock card, and go with a full cover block.....wait I already did!:woot:

[Kunaak]

stock card, test the card, find the max stable clocks for your cooling.

extract the bios, mod the bios, with the max stable OC you determined.
flash the card.

done.

this is usually a better way to do it too.
see usually, you will find "pre overclocked" bioses, are slower speed for speed, then a stock bios.
its cause, to get them high clocks stable, they do things, like lower the ras to cas, and TRP to very low speeds to get them more overclockable.
makes them have nice high numbers, but speed for speed, they are slower...

thats the most common trick I see, when examining these preoverclocked bioses from most companies.

[virtualrain]

Cool... thanks for the insights! Regular base-model it is!

[Baleful]

stock card, test the card, find the max stable clocks for your cooling.

extract the bios, mod the bios, with the max stable OC you determined.
flash the card.

done.

this is usually a better way to do it too.
see usually, you will find "pre overclocked" bioses, are slower speed for speed, then a stock bios.
its cause, to get them high clocks stable, they do things, like lower the ras to cas, and TRP to very low speeds to get them more overclockable.
makes them have nice high numbers, but speed for speed, they are slower...

thats the most common trick I see, when examining these preoverclocked bioses from most companies.

I've never heard of this before. Where can i find more info on this?

[virtualrain]

I've never heard of this before. Where can i find more info on this?

Forums, software, etc. all here... http://www.mvktech.net/

[redcorn]

As the title suggests, I'm buying an 8800GTX for my new rig and will water cool it with MCW-60 and ram sinks.

The question is, will the basic GTX provide as much overclocking potential compared to a factory overclocked card? The difference in price is about 10% which is nothing really, so I'm inclined to go for the higher binned part and see what more I can squeeze out of it. However, if people are consistently blowing the lid off even factory overclocks with a base-model card, perhaps it's a total waste of money?

What's your experience?


Dont spend extra for an overclocked card when you can just flash the video card bios to the factory overclocked speeds. I bought the standard 8800gtx cards from EVGA and then flashed the bios to the Overclocked version with the higher shader clock. The only pre overclocked card I would buy right now is from BFG OC2 it comes with a green PCB which is supposedly hand picked with nvidia GPUs for better overclocked.

All the new overclocked bios for the 8800GTX can be found at this website. Flashing your video card takes 5 seconds and is the best upgrade you can do for them.


http://www.mvktech.net/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/

[virtualrain]

Dont spend extra for an overclocked card when you can just flash the video card bios to the factory overclocked speeds. I bought the standard 8800gtx cards from EVGA and then flashed the bios to the Overclocked version with the higher shader clock. The only pre overclocked card I would buy right now is from BFG OC2 it comes with a green PCB which is supposedly hand picked with nvidia GPUs for better overclocked.

All the new overclocked bios for the 8800GTX can be found at this website. Flashing your video card takes 5 seconds and is the best upgrade you can do for them.


http://www.mvktech.net/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/

Yeah, I'm all over mvktech and bios flashing... I was just wondering if the OC'd cards have binned GPU cores... but it sounds like they don't. I'll be going with EVGA... can't beat their 90-day trade-up offer in this industry!

[dccrens]

I have the "stock" GTX and have used rivatuner to OC up to 625/1026 on air. I have the DD block but haven't installed it yet.