GTX 550 Ti Fan Speed & OC'ing questions

Alright, so I recently started upgrading my fairly old computer with sort of newer equipment. Went from a Pentium Dual Core E2140 CPU to a Core 2 Duo E4500 CPU, went from an EVGA Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT to an MSI Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and I'm planning on putting on some more RAM into the PC.

Now here's my few questions. I'm new to overclocking, and I'm using MSI's afterburner to overclock my GFX Card. First time was a bust, but then I got some helpm from a friend and got it working nicely. But since I'm still new to OC'ing, I'd appreciate it if anyone could throw in some tips out there, maybe on how to do it on the CPU and RAM, or something I might need to know?

My other question is: I currently have the GFX card's fan speed at 70% (it's the Cyclone II from MSI). When I get it to 80% it gets disturbingly loud and I feel like it might explode, fall off, etc. To sum things up, I'm afraid my GFX Card's Fan might get damaged from cranking it up to high speeds. Should I be worried about anything happenning to it? Why or why not?

Thanks in advance guys ^^

 

I just purchased an EVGA 550Ti too, so we're on the same boat here.

- Only increase Core Clock and Shader Clock ~25 MHz at a time, preferably Core before Shader, but if they're locked together then it's still okay. Leave Core Voltage and Memory Clock alone if you don't know what you're doing (they won't help much in performance anyway).

- You probably don't need anything more than 4-6 gigs of RAM. I mean, the more RAM you have the more you can multitask, but whatever game you're playing won't be utilizing a lot of them.

- My fan isn't really loud when at 80%. Imagine a mosquito buzzing right next to your ear. At 70% it's barely noticeable. Also, are you sure it's not the CPU that's wailing instead of your card?

 

nah, thing with the MSI version is it's got this MASSIVE fan and MASSIVE hybrid heat sink... it's super effective, but gets super loud at 80%...the cpu fan is a useless piece of crap that barely moves, while I can feel the fan vibration in my feet lol

I got only 2 gigs of RAM atm, and I wanna triple client, but I'll get send log every time I hit the RAM limit :3...(I HAVE successfully ran 3 clients at once in the past tho ^.^)

I have been doing that, at a smaller rate... but thanks for the tip ^^

 

Yeah, the EVGA 2gb one only has one fan, so it's really quiet.

 

How do you play Aion with such a bad cpu, also it'll prob bottleneck that gpu badly.

 

50+ FPS during normal pvp, 20+ fps during fort raids... i'd say I'm good lol... and it beats my old CPU by A LOT

 

You must get a lot of stutter/fps drops.

 

Is not, getting 20~50 FPS on a MMO game is pretty bad. Your system is bottle-necking your vga, not to mention that you should have get the GTX 560 Ti instead of the 550 Ti. The 550 Ti does not clock as well as the 560 Ti...

I usually set my Fan Speed (%) to 100 when I'm going for performance mode, but since I'm using liquid cooling (More quiet and Cooler compare to Air Cooling) on my 580's so I don't really suffer much from the noise.

And No, Your Card's Fan wouldn't get damaged from cranking it up to high speeds. They are build for speed and performance.

 

Protip: when clocking to high speeds, sometimes this causes the display driver to crash (screen turns black for a few seconds, etc). From my own experience, this is not a overheating issue.

I try to overclock it so the GPU doesn't go over 65C during full load.

You must really be on a budget for that CPU, you can get an i5 2500k for 200$ nowadays.

 

He lives in Brazil which i'm presuming is a lot more expensive there, and he will need to upgrade his mobo and ram to ddr3 which will be even more.

 

I actually Live in Honduras/Spanish/3rd world country because my Gov sucks ballz... the 550Ti is the best I could get within the country, and if I would've had a few more dollars, I would've gotten my a couple of gigs of RAM more, but I ran out of money for that one..

yes, I am running on a crappy computer, but that's as best as it gets for me down here, I actually had a 9400GT and a Pentium CPU before, so my game would be running @ 20-5 FPS generally, 2FPS during fort raids, and 3-5 FPS during PvP...15 FPS during Abyss PvP, which is why I started liking flight pvp in the first place. This hasn't stopped me from enjoying this sht at all tho ^.^

The mobo is and old 04 piece of crap, which I had to..."fix" the latin way yesterday in order for it to let my GFX card go (it had an OLD securing mechanism for the PCI slot that I ripped appart =)), the ram is as old as the computer, so 07', and not a single computer parts store in my city sells thermal paste or aftermarket CPU fans, and considering I live in the most developed city in my country, it's gonna be a while before I get any of those...

I got a small OC on my C2D Processor, from 2.2 GHz to 2.4..did it yesterday and it improved my computer's performance by A LOT.. OC'd my card even more, fan speed at 80% (checked difference between 80% and 100%, and there's virtually none... RPM is always around 3580) and I'm running just fine now, not even reaching the 60C mark. I got almost all graphic options at max (except for Anti-Ailaising and V-Sync) and it is running at a decent speed for my needs, so I am quite happy right now..

I've been reading a lot more on this subject, and now I've fallen deeply in love with the COSMOS II, LCS, and SLI...so now my new goal is to get my college degree and rock the crap out of it in order to get as close to an enthusiast as I can =P.

 

lol, my bad.

 

Check your voltage usage, might result on blue/black screen because you have push it too far. I have occur several times back in the old days with my 800w psu while running on 580's SLI (580's is a very power hunger card indeed) and I usually experience that when I tune my core voltage slightly higher.

After gettihg a 1200w psu, that never happen again.

If you don't have the money to get a new psu but still wanted to push it further, go to the control centre and disable the over-load safe trigger. (Wouldn't recommend thou, but if you wanted to try it, go ahead. With the risk of your whole system failure.)

Most of the X78 and Z68 board supports DDR3 Performance memory only, so if you would like to do an upgrade to Sandy Bridge/extreme (or possibly Ivy Bridge)..you will basically have to build a new system.

Since you had already bought your , I wouldn't recommend you to get another one so swiftly. Its a waste of money as you will gain a better performance with a better overall system build which not to mention will lasts longer comparing to updating a single gpu.

and also, I wouldn't recommend any casual gamer out there to go for SLI / Crossfire (or even Tri, Quad) because you will likely to have the same performance rate compare to 1 gpu on casual gaming performance and is a waste (very waste) of money. Unless you are running fraps or playing on 5860x1080p with NvidiaSurround or Eyefinity and going for Benchmarking results.

Edit: I wouldn't go too far, even for the aftermarket cooling if I were you, from my point of view. is pretty much useless to clock your core as you will have a "slight" (very slight, or even barely) effect on your FPS. Fyi, Even a 3960X clocked to 5.0 (default clock is 4.5 with R4E, liquid cooled) will only give you a 5~7 FPS advantage with the 580's.

 

well I guess extreme OC'ing is an enthusiasts hobby..damn, thnx a lot for the info. rlly appreciate it ^^

 

The moment you desire to turn your graphics up, that's when you become an enthusiast.

 

The ugly truth is...for Overclockers, this is no longer a hobby, is an addiction.

And this addiction comes with a very heavy price tag inched:

 

the graphic card is cheap and you can even run battlefield 3 on it with 70 fps i know because i have the same card

I got pretty old pc aswell just bought new CPU PSU and GPU

Pc specs
AMD phenom 960T x4 ( can be unlocked for 6 cores ) atm non OC'ed because i have boxed fan - Cheap one
Corsair CX430 v2 - Cheap
Gigabyte geforce 550ti OC'ed version
Old MB GA-MA78GM-S2H
Old RAMs Kingston HyperX 4GB KIT DDR2 1066MHz CL5 T1 Series

As i said you can run bf3 on 70 fps no problem

 

here in brazil we got a new law makes eletronic a little ''cheaper'' than before but it keeps double or triple of the price(used to be 5x)

the only thing that keeps much expancive here are procesor and vga

 

I got all those components from Taiwan, Japan, China as it has a cheaper price and tax rate compare to other places. (Because most of the ASUS, Gigabyte products were design and manufactured from those country.)

And I usually hand-carry/check-in on flight with those components to avoid tax (there is also a limit for hand carry, and some of the officer wouldn't let you pass.) But the overall price would be around 20 to 30% cheaper compare to the outside market.

 

I can almost hear you crying over your fried mobo (R.I.P.)