Uh Oh, I think I overclocked my G400 a little too much

[Helevitia]

All 2d apps work but all 3d apps have major corruption and tearing I think I am screwed? Is there anything I can do? Needless to say tat my G400 can't reach MAX speeds. I tried though, damn it! Shit, why can't the G450 be out already.

Dave

[Greebe]

Dave, Does it still corrupt after backing it down? ICQ time?

[Maggi]

Hi Dave,

what kind of cooling did you add and how high did you put it ?

More details please ...

I doubt that you really damaged your card, because if it would be that easy, I would have melted mine about one year ago already ...

Cheers,
Maggi

[Joel]

Maggi's right. Did you add any additional cooling for the G400 other than the heatsink? I have an old 486 CPU fan attached to mine.

Joel

[Helevitia]

Sorry for the delay in response. DNS and/or Access List problem here at work most of the day.

Greebe, thanks for the quick response and offering to help in ICQ but unfortuantely I had to leave to work. yep, still corrupted after backing out the changes.

Maggi & Joel,

No cooling at all, just the heatsink. I know, I know, that was stupid. The card is back to default settings and I rebooted and it is still corrupted OK, now for the scary part...I have a GeForce2 MX lying around that I will be forced to use if I want to play any games...AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!! Please don't let me play with the scary Nvidia monsters. I do have a G200 but I need it for another computer in a day or two and I don't think I could stand the Frame Rates being that slow with Counter Strike. hmmm...? I wonder how the G200 scales with my 700@900? hehe. I guess I'll have to wait and get home to find out. Now for the next logical question, when the hell is the G450 coming out? HAIG! what's the deal? Can you give us a generic answer like, 'it's coming out within a month'??? And just to set the record straight, I bought the Geforce2 MX for my kids machine so he could play games really really fast, but I can't get it to work HAHA! Hopefully I can get it to work in my machine for now.

Dave

[Maggi]

hmmm ... maybe you partly fried you BIOS ?

Try to reflash it and see if that helps ...

[Helevitia]

ok good news...

I came home that night and tested it out again and all corruption was gone. Scary stuff I tell ya! Anyway, I've since slapped a HUGE fan on the heatsink and slowly tried to overclock again(I guess I never learn ). I am now running stable @ 134/174(i think that's the number). I haven't tried to go up further yet, I will probably do that tonight. My 3dmark scores went up to 3197 I want more though.

Dave

[kjliew]

Throughout the time I developed G200CLK and MGATweak, I got graphics corruption every now and then, as parts of the experiments, torturing with my Mystique170, G200 and G400. For GOD's sake, I am lucky that I didn't break any of them. But G400 is a special one, I don't know why. If you got graphics corruption in 3D (such as 3DMark99, Quake2 etc.) with broken glass looking, such corruption won't go away even if you clocked down to default, or sometimes, even reboot the whole system. All I did was to turn off the system, let the chip cool down for some time, then everything will be fine again. It seems to me that G400 3D engine is very sensitive to heat, if you have had an overclocked G400 previously and end up with graphics corruption, clock down to default or even reset the system just doesn't give enough room for the chip to cool down.

BTW, I have a Pentium fan slapped on the heatsink of my G400.

Helevitia, I believe G400 can do more than that, but not every G400 can do MAX setting. Mine works fine at 297 SYSPLL, default dividers and SGRAM optimization. I tried 301.50 aka. MAX settings, 3DMark99Max can last for more than 30min, Quake2 about 20min but Unreal will crash the machine very soon. When Quake2 suffered the broken glass corruption, it didn't crash the system, timedemo still went on. I could pull down the console, quit to Windows and clock down to default, but that wouldn't help. All 3D session now ended up in corruption, even for the simple DirectX6 D3D Tunnel demo.

Hope this helps.

[Gozu]

Ive got my stable at 303 (hehe) but I havnt tried going higher, thats high enough considering its only got 6ns memory. Im a very serious quake player and I can happily say that the card is 100% stable at those speeds. Thats with a normaly sockect370 cpu can attached to the heatsink (its a normal g400)