4870 Overclocking Thread

[dejanh]

Yeah buddy, I have an agenda. That's why I had the 4870 in my hands at Fry's ready to buy before finally deciding on the 260. The 4870 is a great card....I may go for a crossfire setup some day. Like I said in the other thread, an overheating card would be defective, which is a QC issue. That's different than comparing two cards that are known to be manufactured properly. Nvidia, like ATI are always quick to fix their QC issues. Get your logic straight.

As much as this hurts being that I own a 4870 he's sort of right about this. I do wonder why 4870 VRMs are so hard to cool and why a better solution was not devised. 120C+ temps on VRM are not exactly nice.

On a different note, I asked a Diamond rep what do their engineers use to stress test their cards and his answer was "a couple of loops of 3DMark06". Ouch

My 4870 ran at 1100MHz on stock voltage and stock cooling, looping various benchmarks overnight. Never once had an issue with it the 2 weeks that I owned it. As I stated before, the only way to kill memory is to either cause it to overheat or by increasing the voltage, thus causing it to overheat. Either way, it's not happening without modding the video card which is my point all along. It was GAR and a few other that clearly know nothing about memory that claimed the memory degraded simply by overclocking it. It was BS and I was simply pointing it out.

And for what it's worth, EVGA and XFX are rumored to be leaving Nvidia.

Whenever I hear "overclocking" for me that really implies not just upping the frequencies, but also upping voltages. But that's just because of my typical process in overclocking I do stand by the fact that if you up your core to about 800 and your memory to 1100 you will artifact in ATITool in 45min+ runs and FurMark will likely cause your card to crash. I was able to run looped benchmarks THAT WERE NOT ATITool, FurMark, or 3DMark06 TBTs for hours on end without issues, but as soon as you push the card to the max with one of those three the story changes. Anyway, I told people before to try it out if they do not believe it

One further thing worth noting is that different people have different standards on what they consider stable. For me I want 100% stability, all the time, in anything. Any less is not good enough especially if the product being tested is running at stock specifications (e.g., faulty 4870 XOC BEs).

In terms of the XFX/EVGA, those are just rumors IIRC. I remember reading that AMD will not partner with them for the fear of alienating all of their current manufacturers and making their products essentially obsolete. You can see this happening too because current ATI manufacturers do not come even close to the level that XFX and EVGA are at today.