The State of Linux NVIDIA Overclocking

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 7 April 2005 at 01:00 PM EDT. Page 4 of 6. Add A Comment.

Next, we come to the first of the two GeForce 6600GT's in today’s testing, the Gigabyte PCI Express 6600GT GV-NX66T128. This Gigabyte card is practically a replica of the NVIDIA 6600GT reference design. The memory used is from Samsung and is model number K4J553230F-GC20. Stock cooling was used during testing, which consists of a simple active cooling solution on the VPU.

Hardware Components
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz) @ 3.2GHz
Motherboard: Tyan Tomcat i915 S5120
Memory: 512MB Mushkin PC4000
Graphics Card: Gigabyte 6600GT (GV-NX66T128)
Hard Drives: Hitachi 80GB SATA
Optical Drives: Lite-On DVD-ROM
Power Supply: ePower XScale 600W

After reformatting this testbed, updating our packages via our up2date repository, and installing the NVIDIA graphics drivers, the same as we had done on the other machines in the testing today, we gathered some results while the 6600GT was running at stock speeds. Following the same process with the other two cards we've tested so far, we managed to max the frequencies out at 588/1188 from its stock speeds of 500/1000. Attempting to set the memory clock beyond 1188MHz, using the GTK client or the command line options, would result the clock being pushed down to 1188 once the settings were applied. If the memory clock were set beyond 1200MHz, the clock would be pushed back down to 751MHz. Increasing the GPU clock further resulted in instability problems. Overall, we were fairly pleased with these overclocking results compared to similar overclocks with the same card on Windows based machines. We were surprised to see this process go as smoothly as it did, considering 6XXX overclocking (or "oerclocking" as the error message states) is still experimental with NVClock.

  glxgears
500/1000: 7614.4
588/1188: 7743.5
  avgFPS





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