Wondering about my Overclock on my GPU

[Ryoku]

Well, I recently Overclocked my NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT from the standard:

GPU Clock: 600MHz
Memory Clock: 900MHz
Shader Clock: 1500MHz

and I overclocked it to:

GPU Clock: 650 MHz
Memory Clock: 951 MHz
Shader Clock: 1625 MHz

I am wondering if those values for overclocking are safe. At least so my graphics card will last a long time.
If not, what should be the highest overclock on this card recommended without it overheating.
Thank you for your time, and any help is much, much appreciated.

[HunterX]

Stress test it with Atitool, (it works for Nvidia's aswell) If you get artifacts back your OC down a little and try again.

as for heat I have no clue since I don't own that card.

[Ryoku]

imma run ATItool for about an hour
im at 20 minutes, and no errors so far.
i even played crysis for about 2 hours after the overclock and nothing bad happened :>

[Diablo]

Check around the Nvidia, EVGA etc forums and see what others have done with your card.

[Howling]

I found runnin 3d mark 06 is a good little stresser for testing with too, it also gauges the performance of the overclock - kill 2 birds with one stone and nVidia's nTune has a temperature graph somewhere in it (can't remember exactly where though) so just leave that running while stressing and look at the max temps and make sure it's keeping level and not still rising - you don't really wanna go much over 75 on full load. I know their "safety" value is at 105 or something... but running anywhere near that for a period of time is just going to burn your card out.

[Ariel]

Buuuuuuurn!!!!!
I was wondering why i couldn't hear the the CPU fan and when i looked the fan on my 8400 fell off O.o

[phadyd]

Run nvidia's optimizatin wizard, you shuold be able to DL it at there site, takes a few hours for it to do it. Also I always underclock my cards, just so i never have problems. nvidia's software from there control panel has a monitor you can check all your heat and settings on there.

[Diablo]

and the hits just keep on coming.

[Howling]

Yeah I'm beginning to think phadyd is doing it on purpose... No-one, not even one of you lowly americans, can be this stupid. It's statistically impossible...
Thus Phadyd does it on purpose, there's no other explaination

[Ryoku]

uhh.....why underclock :/

uhhh.... what exactly is he doing lolz
i dun get it -.-'

[Skold]

Run it for a bit under stress, if it doesnt crash your good. If at any time later(after its been tested) it crashes, underclock it back to its original settings. Overclocking, no matter what cooling, will always shorten the life of your hardware at least a little bit.

[Howling]

Originally Posted by Skold

Run it for a bit under stress, if it doesnt crash your good. If at any time later(after its been tested) it crashes, underclock it back to its original settings. Overclocking, no matter what cooling, will always shorten the life of your hardware at least a little bit.

While this is true, the life expectancy of parts has increased these past few years.. and it's very likely that even with a mediocre overclock, the parts will still last you until it's time to upgrade (approx 2 years).
So yes, it will shorten the life of your parts - but the chances are you'll change the parts before they die anyway and you'll never even know.. Of course there is always the chance, even without an overclock, that the part will die prematurely -- that's unavoidable, and overclocking does increase the frequency of this (OC'd parts have a higher rate of failure).

Really, thats the biggest downside to overclocking.. Increasing the chances of a premature death.. The part wearing down is very very unlikely to affect most people who upgrade in a reasonable time period.

Think of it like a car.. A car can go 20 years before dying out.. or a car could crash, and thus end prematurely... That's your standard clocked component... Now an overclocked component would be a car with aftermarket performance mods, the car goes quicker, handles better, whatever... Now this will burn the engine out quicker.. say 12 years opposed to 20.. but the chances of crashing the car are now higher than before. The average ownership of a car is something like 4 years I believe, I may be wrong on this but I did hear it at some point. So the likelyhood of the car naturally dying out with OR without the "overclock" are unlikely to affect the average car owner... Leaving only the increased chance of crashing as a drawback (ignoring increased fuel usage).
Over-tuning a car, however, will lead to an impromtu death - applies to overclocking too

Basically, overclocking isn't as dangerous as some people will try and tell you - as long as you do it within appropriate limits.