Upping the voltage on a 7800GTX?

[dynamiks]

I just replaced the heatsink on my eVGA 7800GTX, and I am now recieving wayyyy better temps than stock. At idle, I am getting 37C, and with the OEM heatsink I was getting 50C. Now I am planning on overclocking the card, but I want to know if there is any way to up the voltage on the card to get a more stable overclock at higher speeds? I auto detected my card, and it is lower than I expected. It was 487/1270... I've seen people who auto-detect there cards and are well over 500/1300, even with the stock heatsink. So I am guessing there must be a way to up the voltage to recieve a better overclock? Any help would be great. Thanks.

 

[Zinn]

autodetect is usually BS... my card goes higher easily. find your max stable overclock before you think about voltmodding! i have heard of so many cards failing after a few months voltmodded, even water cooled... you definitely won't get enough performance out of your overclock to make the difference in games worth your card's premature death.

of course if you're going for benchmark goodness, by all means go for it, but i do believe that it would be smart to find your max stable OC at stock voltage in any case!

that said, you have to flash a new bios to overvolt the card, unless you want to do a hard mod (which is unneccessary for Nvidia cards)... just download nvflash, use it to rip a ROM of your card's BIOS, get the new version of Nibitor to edit the ROM and up the voltage, save a new ROM (keep the original backed up), and flash it.

You'll probably get a better OC for a few months, followed by an expensive keychain! Good luck.

 

[btf]

I thought there was no way to soft volt mod the 7800 like you could the 6800?