Come on now Big....I'm not one of those crazy kids Lol.....12 Months in this condition and no problems at all.But than again there is an art to O'clocking succesfully. :)Bobby

Another factor to throw into this discussion... and it does indeed have everything to do with the drivers.How are these folks measuring their "10 degree" increase in tempurature? Through the drivers? I think most are... so the next question has to do with the measuring accuracy of the drivers. Could the algorithms within the drivers be wrong (anyone who owns an ASUS motherboard knows how useless ASUS Probe is for measuring MB/CPU temps). So, are the drivers increasing temps or are the temps simply being read incorrectly?Until we start seeing numerous VPU's going up in smoke and monitors rolling on their backs to kick their legs up, me thinks this is all a lot of paranoia.Funny thing is, in visiting the numerous fora where these discussions are taking place, the guys who are the most paranoid are the ones using a high OC for their video cards (no implication pointed in your direction, Bobby... I know how long ago you modded your card and that your've had no problems).

I've been playing this overclocking game for a lot of years now (since 1995 actually), CPUs/video cards/RAM you name it. Once overclocking limits are establish via testing, I've never seen more than a slight difference in these limits between drivers. As I stated in my post, my card runs faultessly at even higher overclocking settings with the 3.7 drivers or earlier. By this, I mean that my video card stable at 425MHz core (versus 380MHz Pro default or 325MHz non-Pro default) and 370MHz memory (versus 340MHz Pro and 290MHz non-Pro) with 3.7 drivers and earlier. Like 24hrs straight of 3DMark2001SE loop stable.As you can see, I have a significant amount of headroom left when I run at stock Pro speed, I hence have trouble buying the suggestion that the 3.8's have unleashed reserve power in the 9800 chipset. In fact, given that the 3.8's benchmark at about the same performance as the 3.7's, I would postulate that it was more likely that something broke in the 3.8's rather than being unleashed.My bet is that this issue will magically go away with the 3.9's. Gary

Bobby,Haven't tried the leaked Dell 3.8's, but I do read that they are proving to be a good driver. My RAM is Samsung 3.3ns, which is supposed to be OK for overclocking. As you can see from my above post, I can pull 370MHz memory speed out of it and I am only running at 340MHz stock Pro, hence this should not be causing me any problems.Heck, I might even give the leaked 3.8's a shot. Will report back on my success or otherwise.Gary

Gary,Give them a try. It's funny, my 9800Pro 256 loves the 3.8's from ATI. I don't run the omega's on it becuase I don't run FS9 on the box so no issues. In fact the 3.8's were worth 221 points on 3DMark 03.The 3.3ns Samsung, although good memory, is probably what's causing your artifacting over a period of time with the 3.8's. Heat becomes a major issue when running a modded bios due to the limits the card is being pushed at. Throw in OC'ing and your really walking the "Bleeding" edge. In all honesty 370 with a correctly modded Bios is a walk in the park. I have a 9800NP on my bench with the 9800Pro Bios that will do 400Mhz Mem. all day with the stock cooling setup. But than again this card also runs the 2.8ns Samsung Mem. :)Let me know how you make out.Bobby

Yes, I agree that many will do whatever to max out their performance. However, if we ignore the "heating" and "HW damage" claims there remains the stability issues that many have experienced including myself. Now I'm a careful 35+ year old electrical engineer, with wife and two kids :-), if that adds to my credibility?I most certainly didn't like the large flashing triangles, followed by a nasty noise and BSOD's that appeared to be a new feature of the 3.8's in conjunction with my system.

Bobby,I actually bought a 9800 NP a couple of months back and it had the 2.86ns (GC2A) Samsumg RAM, but my results with the 9800 PRO BIOS were dissapointing. I ended up with snow above 320MHz or so memory clock and I could in fact clock it a bit higher with the original NP BIOS. So, I thought that I'd be better of buying a PRO, so I returned my NP and bought a PRO for $349. The PRO can easily reach 370MHz on the memory before artifacts start to appear...Now the interesting thing is that at first sight the PRO and non-PRO appeared to have the exact same Samsumg GC2A memory, but taking a closer look revealed that the PRO actually uses a newer variant of the GC2A memory that can accept a larger Vdd range than the memory on the non-pro that had to be supplied with a specific fixed supply voltage. K4D26323RA-GC2A (Vdd=2.8v) on the non-pro and K4D263238A-GC2A with wider Vdd range on the PRO version.Anyway, thought you might find that interesting...To add to the original discussion, I do not have a soft-modded card and still experienced rather nasty stability issues with the 3.8's.Joe

The first Pro bios I tried in my NP behaved exactly as yours did ie. artifacts at stock pro speed, even though I could overclock it past pro speed with the original NP bios :-hmmm I gave up overclocking this card until I was once again surfing rage3d and discovered that others had experienced the same phenomenon, always with the same Pro bios version. Turns out this bios version was a bit of a dud and there was a better one out there to try. Sure as eggs, one bios flash later and my card thought it was a pro and was able to go even further overclocking than it did with the NP bios. Apparently the mem voltage is a little bit higher with the Pro, thus explaining the greater overclock potential.Anyway I've just loaded up the leaked dell 3.8's and everything seems good so far at stock pro speed. Now, time to get back to FS9. I'm currently completing a round the world tour (mostly 2 hour hops) in the 767 PIC with my son on his computer in multiplayer mode.Gary

After a day or so of testing with the Omega modded Dell 3.8's, my verdict is: :-jumpy Smooth FS9 frames, no menu flicker, no artifacts, no lockups, and my video card overclocks as well as it ever has.A big :-beerchug to you Bobby for this suggestion.Gary

Knew I shouldn't have returned my NP so early :-) Oh well, never mind. Good news about Omega 3.8+. I'm still feeling a bit of the once bitten twice shy thing at the moment, but may give those a shot when I get time.Thanks for the report.Joe