NVIDIA CoolBits For Linux Guide

To check for stability issues and artifacts, Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo (3334), SPECViewPerf (8.1), and Doom 3 (1.3.1302) were used. The two independent systems we tested Linux CoolBits on for this article today, contained the following components:

With the Linux CoolBits offering a very easy-to-use yet intuitive interface, and similar to that of its Windows counterpart, we were quickly off from the starting gate and adjusting the clock speeds. The first testbed, which contained a Gigabyte 6600GT PCI Express, runs at stock speeds of 500MHz/1000MHz (GPU/MEM). After waiting several minutes for CoolBits to detect the optimal frequencies, the speeds returned were 576/1153. At these speeds, we found the graphics card to be stable in all of our 3D testing. This is compared against the 588/1188 we were able to achieve manually with the latest NVClock 0.8 CVS. Like CoolBits for Windows, the automatically detected frequencies find the maximum frequency for both the GPU and memory where they both remain ultimately stable. This means we can generally push the clock frequencies even further by a small percentage without noticing any instability problems or artifacts appearing. In the case of our Gigabyte 6600GT, we were able to go as far as 599/1253! At these speeds however, we did notice a few blue artifacts appear when were running Doom 3. Due to the small amount of artifacts, we bumped our clock speeds down to 592/1244. At these refined speeds, we encountered no instability problems or artifacts appearing when doing any 3D gaming. Overall, we feel we were most successful when overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT PCI Express under Linux with CoolBits.

Onto our second testbed in this article, which has previously been overclocked to 425/850 with NVClock and 464/926 with CoolBits Windows, quite a while ago. Keep in mind, the stock speeds for the GeForce 5900XT are 390/700 (VPU/MEM). Using the auto-detect feature, the speeds generated were 455/832. As we had previously run this same exact card at 464/926, we decided to run the card at those speeds again. To our pleasure, the card had no problem running at those speeds again under Linux. After spending some more time tweaking the VPU and memory clocks, we arrived at 464/950 with no artifacts! However, the heat produced was a bit too much for our comfort so we ended up lowering the frequencies.

Although CoolBits for Linux is a great utility all around, it still has its problems. One such option we would like to see added is the ability to apply the overclocked settings at startup, saving the time from having to go into nvidia-settings each time to re-tune the frequencies. The auto-detect function is also very nice, as it was able to sufficiently detect the optimal clock frequencies for the GPU and memory without losing stability. Even though Linux CoolBits isn’t yet perfect, it’s damn close to its Windows counterpart and is very much a viable alternative to users of NVClock who currently are struggling to overclock their graphics cards. The developers over at NVIDIA deserve to be applauded for an exceptional job well done with this new driver set, and we hope they can only continue to improve upon these Linux display drivers and CoolBits.