Overclocking killed my G400

[BullFrag]

Hi! I've bought a plain G400 32MB DH 10 months ago and overclocked it from a default of 125/166MHz to 150/200MHz using MGATweak. I cooled the core with a big heatsink/cardcooler and placed some IC-heatsinks on the memory.
Two weeks ago it was suddenly showing visual artifacts, garbled fonts/cursor and much more, in WinNT and Win98, also with generic VGA-drivers and even DOS showed some false chars. Even underclocking would not help.
Put this together with reports of various Nvidia-Cards and you will see that graphic cards memory is much more sensible to overclocking than the core. It's a pity it is more important for performance, too.
My card is now being RMA'd by Matrox Europe in Ireland. Take care and excuse my English.

[R@nkor]

To me, it's not worth it to oc the video card. Personally, I notice more performance in oc'ing the proc.

And considering that today's vid cards are more pricier than some processors, I wouldn't take chances in oc'ing the card.

Not a very good example but I have a V3 2000 (along the side and I oc'd it from stock 143 to 166 to 183 w/out noticing any difference in frame rate. All it does is heat up the core chipset and the RAM and contributes to overall heat in your computer case. With this same setup, I slapped in a faster processor and frame rates shot through the roof.

[This message has been edited by R@nkor (edited 23 July 2000).]

[BullFrag]

Overclocking the graphic cards memory is very useful for resolutions higher than 1024x768 and 32bit color. I think it is the limiting factor for 3D, because T&L in the graphics chip and ISSE and 3Dnow in modern CPUs can deliver geometry very fast.
Also please consider the following: an old Celeron 500 with a Geforce is faster than a P3 800 with a G400. So getting hardware T&L could be smart.
But you are right here: If someone owns a Celeron 500, he will have the same speed with a Geforce 2 GTS or a Geforce with SDRAM.

[Greebe]

Maybe this thread should be sent to the proper people at Matrox. If you trash your card via OCing that in itself voids the warranty. If you try to get an RMA replacement then this is would be considered fraud. Just a thought.

[This message has been edited by Greebe (edited 23 July 2000).]

[Joel]

No need to worry about that Greebe. You know as well as I do that the head of tech support at Matrox vists here quite often.

BTW: I have a plain G400 with the 6ns memory chips that I have had since June of 1999 with a fan attached to the factory heatsink clocked to 150/200 and so far no problems. It could be something else wrong in his system. Like a memory module going bad.

Joel

[Greebe]

R@nkor, all that proves is your cpu was the limiting factor... not that OCing the Gcard won't boost proformance.

[RAB]

BullFrag and R@nkor,
Remember also that the PD6.0 beta drivers do NOT overclock. So you are wasting your efforts if you have these installed and only risk frying your G400 (as you apparently did).

RAB

[BullFrag]

Greebe and Joel, I'm also a Matrox veteran, since 10 years ago I had nearly every Matrox card, but this is the first time something is broken. If your cards would fail and TechSupport agrees to RMA it, what would you do? Maybe Matrox will tell after inspection of the card it failed certainly because of overclocking and warranty is void, this also could happen. What do you think about the tweak utility by Matrox? There is no warning it could damage the card permanently.

RAB, I haven't installed PD6.0 beta drivers. Why should Matrox make them incompatible with their own utilities?

[Joel]

We're not just talking about the overclocking but all the other stuff you have attached to that card. The minute I put the fan on mine the warranty became void.

Joel