Nvidia OC'ing: To link or unlink?

[novadaemon]

When you guys OC do you recommend linking or unlinking the shaders from the core frequency? How would you go about it in bios overclocking?

I have a spare 8600gt lying around, and I wanna fool with it a bit so I'd appreciate any personal experience in your Nvidia OC'ing.

 

[MANIST]

First thing go online get an idea of what people are oc them to, then start around there as a base line. Then keep your v-ram around stock and push the core and shader linked until you start getting screen freezing or micro white dots from shader being to high. You will always be limited by your shader always. Once you get an idea of high how you can push your shader then unlink them and start pushing your core to the limit.

Run 3dmark03 to stress your video card as its the most VGA dependent and then some Crysis bench's if you have it. After that push your v-ram until you start to get some heavy artifacting and back off until you are stable. While testing V-ram make sure you have your core and shader cranked up so it reflects your overall power consumption and heat output. If you left your core and shader stock you possibly could sqew your testing since the ram has a possibilty of clocking higher than it would if you had core cranked with it. Make sure you test in order of shader then core then v-ram, also while pushing your shader and testing 3dmark03 if you push shader to high you will actually lose FPS's.

As always have fun and monitor everything from rivatuner.

 

[novadaemon]

Thanks for your advice. I had no idea that the shader would give out first. Why do you recommend 3dmark03 vs more shader intensive benchmarks like 06 or vantage?

 

[magoo]

Unless you are interested in world records......

Just use evga's Precision tool, link 'em up and shoot from the hip.

I generally take my vanilla cards and set them to what BFG pulls on their max. OC editions. If the cards can run my favorite game at those settings and reasonable temps, I'll start to edge up the clocks and see where they fall apart.

 

[MANIST]

3dmark03 is much more reflective of VGA power and gains from clocking it higher, also dosnt take as long to run as VANTAGE and 3D06 is just a cpu hog. Plus I find that I can see instabilities faster in 03 when it gets to proxcon or nature. When your shader quits going higher push your core unlinked as it will give you the best gains until you hit a video card memory bottlekneck.
I have this poor little 8400gs factory 450core 1100 shader 800ram, it has the worst friggin memory bottlekneck on the planet. It goes to 690 core and 1700 on the shader 1040 on ram, but on 3d03 i get no more points going from 550mhz core to 690-720mhz core cause of the shitty DDR2 on it.