Advice needed

[sandar]

I have just found that I have something called 'Smart doctor' installed. It either came with the mother board or the Geforce 8500GT card.
It tells me that my card is running OK and at the following settings:

Engine 459MHz
Memory 664MHz
Shader 918MHz

I can adjust these three settings, but the question is, "how much improvement, if any, will I get and at what cost"? If it is worth trying, what setting should I try.

I know how to use a PC from the outside, but I do not know how they work on the inside, so I am wary of clocking the card in case I cause harm.

Thanks for any advice.

[stansdds]

My experience has been that overclocking a video card brings very small improvements, especially with flight sims, but can quickly overheat. Flight sims are far more CPU intensive. I would not expect great things from a 8500GT, even if it will overclock, as the 8500GT is a budget card and not really intended to be a gaming card.

[hey_moe]

I agree with that statement too. If you are running on water you can OC with no problem. I have OCed my card to where it wouldn't even boot and the backed up a bit. I only saw a few frames different...Mike

My experience has been that overclocking a video card brings very small improvements, especially with flight sims, but can quickly overheat. Flight sims are far more CPU intensive. I would not expect great things from a 8500GT, even if it will overclock, as the 8500GT is a budget card and not really intended to be a gaming card.

[sandar]

Thanks guys for the input. Just prior to accessing SOH, I had to reboot as my PC wouldn'y open some programs. When it restarted I had a mesage from 'SmartDoctor' telling me my VGA chipset is overheating and I haven't touched anything yet (and now I won't).

[Moparmike]

Yup, the 8500GT is considered an entry-level card and most of them have far from adequate heatsinks on the GPU chip...and many of em don't have any heatsinks on the memory chips either.

You could upgrade the heatsinks on the card if you're bent on OCing it but for the cost you could probably move up to an 8800 or other faster "older" card that runs at a higher speed and get the same benefits without the extra labor. As already noted, MSFS is more dependent on the CPU than the GPU so the gain will be marginal.

On my XFX 8800GTS, which has pretty decent cooling on the memory chips and GPU, I was able to get a stable 20% overclock...it did make a small difference in FSX (I can crank up a few more of the advanced "pretties") but on your 8500 I don't think you'd see much improvement.

[stansdds]

If you are not using Windows Vista or have no desire to use DX10, the old 7950GT card is a good one, especially for flight sims. I had one paired with a AMD Athlon 64 4000+. I overclocked the CPU and was able to fly online with water=2 and maintain 40+ fps. Water=3 or 4 was fine offline. If you want to use a newer card, the 8800GT is hard to beat when it comes to performance and cost.

[sandar]

Here is an update. Apparently I do not have a problem with overheating. However, I do have a problem the the program monitoring of the temperature, I get told lies. It is perfectly OK. Thanks for the input guys.

Incidentally, the MoBo bundle was a Christmas present and it has made a monstrous difference to the quality and frame rates of FS9. Gone from 4fps over London and around 16 over open country, both with middle settings to 14fps over London and over 60fps over open country and that is with everything maxed out. I do still get a little stuttering and some the blurries with photo scenery

[Moparmike]

For monitoring (and tweaking) the Nvidia GPUs, I've used RivaTuner for many years. Haven't had any problems with it.
Check it out here: http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner

I've never used Asus' Smart Doctor, but my Asus MoBo did come with PCProbe...which also has a couple little niggles with temp monitoring. Not sure if it's a software issue or what, but when I compare it's results to the BIOS temp readings or a couple of other monitoring programs it has always been off a few degrees. Might be the same issue with their Smart Doctor utility for vid-cards too?