- Joined
- Jan 29, 2006
My 8600GT Mod - and why do androids need boobs anyway?
Hi again, I thought you guys might find this interesting…
I got boarded of waiting for the “proper” mid-range cards to turn up so I picked up an Inno3D 8600GT for £55 – bargin? Not really, when the card arrived I was annoyed to find it was not the one pictured but was built on what looks like an 8500GT PCB, no HDCP, only one DVI port and a cheap wire inductor that looks like it fell out of a valve radio.
But every cloud has a silver lining; thankfully it still had DDR3 memory [samsung 1.3ns] and thanks to the new budget layout I was able to replace the monkey-metal sink that came on the card with an old X1950XT sink I had lying around. I pulled the sink apart to have a look and was surprised to find the sold copper block had heat-pipes running thought it and a nifty spring mounting system. Lucky l didn’t chuck it out after all.
After cutting the rounded section off it was actually possible to mount the plate without drilling any additional holes, even the memory pads lined up ok. I had to move a few bits to the back of the card but I had the soldering iron out to do the volt-mods anyway so why not I thought.
It might have been possible to mount the thing in one piece, [with the fan the right way up], but I’d have had to move a lot more stuff around and sealing the fan hosing to the PCB would be a pain… and I think it looks cooler this way anyway! 8)
At stock voltage the card ran at ~55c under load, down from over 80c with the standard sink. Not bad, so now to up the volts…
Amazingly I was able to get the core up to 1GHz @ 1.75v and the mem to 1GHz @ 2.3v, there was some minor artefacting but it was stable enough to finish 3Dmark06:
4837 = 540MHz - 700MHz - stock
5892 = 660MHz - 900MHz - max OC @ stock volts [1.35v core, 2.00v mem]
6924 = 1GHz - 1GHz @ 1.75v core, 2.30v mem
I’m sure I could break 7000 but my CPU is holding the scores back, what’s in a number anyway... lol
Now, you might be wondering why I keep on talking about the card in the past tense, sadly there is a good reason for this!
Despite being made to stand on her head, Sapphire’s perky-breasted android-ette [?!?] was doing a great job keeping the core temperature below 90c even at these suicidal voltages.
But… I had failed to notice several of the FETs were actually running hotter than the sun and despite my belated, botched attempts to sink them they were mortally wounded. After a few days of heavy use [namely Bioshock] I woke to the unmistakable smell of lightly toasted graphics card 8(
I will try and track down some replacements but it’s not looking good.
Greed is one of the se7en deadly sins for a reason guys; don’t make the same mistake I did!
Cheers,
Nick
Hi again, I thought you guys might find this interesting…
I got boarded of waiting for the “proper” mid-range cards to turn up so I picked up an Inno3D 8600GT for £55 – bargin? Not really, when the card arrived I was annoyed to find it was not the one pictured but was built on what looks like an 8500GT PCB, no HDCP, only one DVI port and a cheap wire inductor that looks like it fell out of a valve radio.
But every cloud has a silver lining; thankfully it still had DDR3 memory [samsung 1.3ns] and thanks to the new budget layout I was able to replace the monkey-metal sink that came on the card with an old X1950XT sink I had lying around. I pulled the sink apart to have a look and was surprised to find the sold copper block had heat-pipes running thought it and a nifty spring mounting system. Lucky l didn’t chuck it out after all.
After cutting the rounded section off it was actually possible to mount the plate without drilling any additional holes, even the memory pads lined up ok. I had to move a few bits to the back of the card but I had the soldering iron out to do the volt-mods anyway so why not I thought.
It might have been possible to mount the thing in one piece, [with the fan the right way up], but I’d have had to move a lot more stuff around and sealing the fan hosing to the PCB would be a pain… and I think it looks cooler this way anyway! 8)
At stock voltage the card ran at ~55c under load, down from over 80c with the standard sink. Not bad, so now to up the volts…
Amazingly I was able to get the core up to 1GHz @ 1.75v and the mem to 1GHz @ 2.3v, there was some minor artefacting but it was stable enough to finish 3Dmark06:
4837 = 540MHz - 700MHz - stock
5892 = 660MHz - 900MHz - max OC @ stock volts [1.35v core, 2.00v mem]
6924 = 1GHz - 1GHz @ 1.75v core, 2.30v mem
I’m sure I could break 7000 but my CPU is holding the scores back, what’s in a number anyway... lol
Now, you might be wondering why I keep on talking about the card in the past tense, sadly there is a good reason for this!
Despite being made to stand on her head, Sapphire’s perky-breasted android-ette [?!?] was doing a great job keeping the core temperature below 90c even at these suicidal voltages.
But… I had failed to notice several of the FETs were actually running hotter than the sun and despite my belated, botched attempts to sink them they were mortally wounded. After a few days of heavy use [namely Bioshock] I woke to the unmistakable smell of lightly toasted graphics card 8(
I will try and track down some replacements but it’s not looking good.
Greed is one of the se7en deadly sins for a reason guys; don’t make the same mistake I did!
Cheers,
Nick
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