Overclocking a 7900 gt, few questions

Hello,
I have a 7900 gt, and have unlocked the overclocking features with coolbits. I chose "find optimal" and it set the core to 590 MHz and Memory to 1.68 GHz. My question is: is this a bad idea? I'm not so skeptical about the 3d core since I can track the temperature of it (it runs at 45 C idle, only a difference of 3 C from stock speeds of 450 MHz.) The memory, however, has no cooling on it nor a temperature monitor. The original speed was 1.37 GHz, which was an increase of .31 GHz.

It has been running stable for about a week.. but I was unsure of whether to downclock my VRAM just to be sure. Opinions?

 

run a stress test like 3dmark05/06 If you get artifacts or it crashes then its a bad OC and you'll have to back it down a bit until it stabilizes. If it runs fine, try bumping up the speeds a bit more yourself until u encounter instability.

 

Are there any stress tests that are a smaller download? I have limited bandwidth here in my dorm. I ran HL2's benchmarks and BF 2142 for a while with no artifacting, is that "stressful" enough to be decisive?

 

eh....i dunno, i havent found BF2142 or HL2 to be too stressful on more modern systems. But i think ive got a solution:

In the overclocking section there is a thread called "found new benchmarking program" or something similar. Download the small program that they link to and run the stress test for a while. You could also download ATItool and scan for artifacts. If ya want 3dmark i could possibly mail u a CD or sumthing...

 

Thanks for the offer, I think I can wait a week till I get home to download it, after my finals. Also, what is a good temperature range for a gpu?

 

eh...they can take more heat than CPUs, mine idles about 50C, makes around 60C. Overclocking didnt raise my temps at all from stock. Id say anything from 30C to 50C would be acceptable. You can always upgrade the cooler if u needed, they arent more than $30-$40