7800GTX overclocking - damage?

There are no safe limits to overclocking, if you overclock and it fries, your out the price of the card. For some people that's a drop int he bucket, but for a 360-420 dollar video card, personally is too much to gamble on.

so with my old 9100, I accidently set the core to 700 instead of 500 on time..finger slipped or something.. when I applied the settings, my desktop artifacted like there was no tomorrow.. It lost control.. upon a hardboot and restart, it clocked itself back down and ran fine with a moderate overclock for quitesome time. this was over a year ago, and now my friend is still using the system without a problem.

The core on the 7800gtx go is the same as what is used in desktop cards from what I understand. There are retail 7800gtx cards that are clocked near the 500 mark by default, so I wouldn't worry too much. Heat is your main concern, and with today's cards, as long as they're run properly, they are difficult to damage with heat, they clock down and whatnot. and against your fear of a decreased life span, if you continue to run at those clock speeds, they may reduce the lifespan from 12 years to 9 years, but it wont die tomorrow, and if you clock it back down, it could live closer to its original lifespan. All cards and cores are different, so you can never know for sure, but I would go for it..


for this question, if there were no procautions built into the card to downclock at high temps, the only worry I could see is damaging the thermal compound between the card and heatsink, and they are usually able to withstand temps well above what your card could handle without bursting into flame. I guess it's also plausable that a single pipeline could burn out and become unusable, but if this were the case, the system probably wouldn't boot.

regardless of what anybody says when selling a computer or video card, the card WAS overclocked. It's just something that people do. Curiosity. Most of them lie about it, so be glad your seller is trying to be honest. Look around on the forums. you'll see people with higher running overclocks, and even further failed attempts, and unless there was some major negligence, rarely do you see a thread about somebody killing the card strictly due to a single, high overclock

How much is the person selling the 9300 for?

If it is my machine those settings aren't accurate It's at 460x1200

If you buy an used notebook, the risk is the same regardless of O/Ced or not.
Since you don't know it's O/Ced or not.

In your case, the seller is saying it's O/Ced and he is still running it O/Ced, that means it's a higher chance the video is still working at that speed, which can be a good thing.

I've overclocked the crap out of my 7800gtx (500/1300). I dont run it every day at that speed, just to get a good 3dmark score. These cards are tougher than you think. I've even had the vcore up to 1.5 volts and it still runs great. I can play CS:sourse for hours and it wont break 75C.(81C-NvidCP)

WOW thats insane clock, lol i only did mines at 435c/1200.. i am too scare to clock it that high. what was your score at does clock?

If you get a good price, I wouldn't worry too much. Take the clocks down when you get it if you are worried.

I would go 430/1200 similar to the desktop version or back to the originals if you don't need the ooomph. If you want to keep the performance, keep what he has and check if it is stable. I would love to overclock my card that high when the warranty is done.

You might ask if he overvolted to get those speeds. Also, consider that you will have to do a BIOS flash to lower speeds if you do so. Pretty easy, but there are a few people who messed it up.

well if i got my card to 435c/1200 and did an ati tool check and got no erros. me not knowing anything about overclock or stuff like that.. i think he can do it if he reads well.

Mr. K6 beat me by a little. 500/1300 on 3dmark05 is 8345.

I say run at 430-450 max for 24/7 uses. You won't see the difference is 20-30MHZ on the core, but you will see arifacts and this can damage the card over time as its pushed passed its limits.