Originally posted by: taltamir
OOooh.... thats a really nice tidbit there... buy the stock evga GT and hope you get a SC in the stock box... thats really nice
I guess they made a little oopsie.
Perhaps (I'll know about mine on Monday), but the MAJOR question is:
what's the NATURE of the OOPS?
1) OOPS we didn't have enough non-SC hardware, so we sent out hardware
that was SC certified / tested and a BIOS to match?
or (worse)
2) OOPS we took generic non-SC boards, put the wrong BIOS settings on them,
and the BIOS will *try* to run them at SC speeds. Will they be STABLE at those
speeds with good temperatures? We don't know, we didn't test them for that.
or (best)
3) Well the BIOS defaults may be SC, but there's really no such thing as a
"SC" capable board vs. a "non SC" capable board -- they should ALL just work
100% at that level of 'overclock' we don't have to test them to ensure that
because that's what our engineers and NVIDIA's designed them to work around.
So basically ANYONE could use a tuner application to run stably at those
frequencies no problems no matter what board / BIOS they get.
I'm inclined to believe the answer is somewhere between #2 and #3 -- MOST
generic model boards can PROBABLY be overclocked to those levels and be
stable, though maybe there will be real problems (perhaps even at STOCK speeds)
with some people's systems due to inadequate case air cooling. These 8800GTs
only have a single slot cooler and that's probably kind of marginal at cooling the
heat load even at STOCK speed especially in cases with low airflow and cramped
interiors.
We'll have to see how many people hit red-alert level temperatures with these
new 8800GTs under heavy loads like playing lots of Crysis at high res. in
small mid-tower cases.... Those people will most certainly NOT want an
overclocked 'by default' card, but the real problem is mainly their case / PSU.