Just bought a MSI 8800 GTS 640MB :P

[DerekOldschool]

I AM TOTALLY STOKED!!!

I received my new MSI 8800 GTS from NCIX a few days ago and I'm quite pleased overall. I managed to grab it before they removed the $50 instant rebate, so I only paid $469 for the card.

I wanted to get the E-VGA one from Direct Canada, but it was listed as unavailable last week.

However, I'm kinda glad that the EVGA 8800 was unavailable because the MSI card had a few other things going for it. Not only did it have the instant rebate at the time, but when I received the card, it was actually the OC version. Instead of the listed 500/1600Mhz, the clocks speeds were 575/1700Mhz out of the box!

AND (if it can get any better!!!) the card was shipped with Company of Heroes instead of the pictured Serious Sam 2 (I already had SS2 for awhile now) COH was $45 at my local vid game store!

I currently have the card running stable at 621/1872Mhz and my temps haven't went over 75C yet. That's pretty much what my 7900GT ran at.
3d06 score went from 5146 with the 7900GT up to 9119 with the 8800GTS

[BALISTX]

Congrats on the buy and your good fortune with this card. Sounds like it provide you many hours of gaming joy and excitement.

[sswilson]

Cool!!!!

Put them extra framerates to use and go out to frag somebody with a lesser card............... :)

[ragenrok]

Nice I acctually just managed to snag a EVGA 8800 gts from tigerdirect.ca for only $450, 1 hour after i bought it the sale ended and the card went back to almost 550 or something like that lol. I get the card in the mail today im so excited (and i just can't hide it lol)

I paid a fortune for my BFG 8800GTS 640M OC. BFG is so expensive :(

[Patriote]

Congrats & Enjoy!

[Faded]

Well, after many tests, I have found the limit of my GTS.

My EVGA 8800 GTS 640 went from the default 513 core and 792 (1584 effective) memory and have bumped it to the top reliable speed of 642 core and 1030 (2060 effective).

At those speeds I ran ATITool 'Scan for artifacts' overnight and played LOTRO for 5 hours last night without issue. The card stayed in around 75-78 degrees at that speed with the stock HS. These cards are great.. I was never able to bump any of my Sapphire ATI cards at all reliably.. this thing just wants to go!!!

Next is to overclock the rest of the system...

[DerekOldschool]

I currently have mine running at 633/973.

I was experiencing around the same temps as you - which I thought were pretty high.

I ended up downloading Riva Tuner

Now I can get at the low level fan settings and when I set the fan to run @ 100% (instead of the stock 60%) my load temps went from 75c or so down to 65c!

Having the fan at 100% does generate some extra noise, but when I'm playing a game, I either got the headphones on or I have my speakers & subwoofer cranked, so a little fan noise doesn't make a difference.

I tried using the nvidia control panel to control the fans, but it doesn't seem to work. Perhaps its just because I'm running XP pro x64 bit edition.

I also noticed something else when overclocking the card: I use a small program called NVtray that has a nice little OSD when playing my games that shows the temp of the GPU and FPS and a couple of other things about the vid-card. When I overclock the card too much with ATI tool or the Nvidia control panel, for some reason, I loose the OSD - it app just craps out. However, when I overclock the card using Riva Tuner, NVtray's OSD app doesn't crap out and continues to work at much higher overclocks. I guess Riva tuner doesn't conflict with MS Framework, which is what this NVtray uses.

I think I can probably get a little more out of this card (especially with the fan at 100%) but for now I'm just enjoying my current settings. I really noticed a difference once I overclocked the card - I was able to bump up a few games to the next level of graphics performance that were not really playable before.

[sswilson]

20%+ OC on your already high end GPU?

Damn, that's pretty sweet!

I've never had much luck OC'ing vid cards but then again I usually pick up the close to EOL "last kick at the cat for platform" version (9600XT, 6600GT, 1950pro) so there isn't a lot of headroom left.

[DerekOldschool]

Hey SSwilson, you runnin' the same RAM as me?

Do you have the OCZ platinum EB's? Just wondering.... your timings in your sig are the same as what I'm running with this memory - same divider too)

EDIT: forgot to comment on the fact that I had previously had no luck with overclocking my vidio cards in the past. I usually left it at stock, because of artifacts and instability - I just didn't think it was worth it. This was with my other two cards; a BFG 6800GT and a 7900GT. However, I finally bit the bullet and bought this monster vid card and low and behold, you get what you pay for. I couldn't justify $700 for the GTX when my CPU can't really unleash the power of that card. I'm very happy with what I bought and perhaps an upgrade to SLI when I upgrade to a new system may be in order for the future.