Page 2 - Can someone tell me Why? (BFG GeForce 6200 OC)

it seems at the moment, know one knows???

its a real shame as i know this card's core has more potential than 350mhz. For now the ram will have to run at 700mhz and the core stock. If anyone knows anything more about the core lock on agp 6200's, please post!!!!!!!!!!!

mines the A4 core - does anyone else know theirs???

Since it has come up with the 6200s being locked or suddenly becoming locked, I decided to look into it.
The first thing I found is that anyone who had reported their cards not being able to overclock, were using drivers in the 77.xx range. Though I have seen cards using the 77.84 revision, but Ive also seen reports of the 77.77 locking the card. So thats the first thing to try, roll back to an earlier drive revision. The 76.44 seem to work so you may want to try that. Also look into modified drivers like the zero point drivers or the omega drivers. Of course there are others you can try, those are just the first two that come to mind that are pretty high standard

Now on the topic of core revisions, I have also seen indications that the A4 revision are hard locked, and A2 revisions seeminly are the best overclockers. but mixed results with everything eles. So I really dont know what to tell you, other than really get down to researching your card further, and see what everyone else is getting.

I would not be suprised if there was a hardlock, bios lock, or driver lock to keep these cards from their full potential, seeing is how about 70% of the original cards sent out under the first revision ended up being unlocked to 8 pipes and overclocked to speeds that would rival and out pace the 6600GT, which is roughly a 60-70% performence increase...and for a budget card to have that kind of success rate a lot of people rolled the dice and came up on top.

So I would suggest trying older drivers to see if you can rule that out quick. Then I would suggest looking at bios images, maybe you can find a properly modified one to allow for some real overclocking. If neither of those work then inless you wanna try a volt mod, I think your out of luck.

*edit*
check the nvidia video card section, someone else had a 6200 question along the same lines so i looked a bit deeper and found some more information that will apply

how safe is it to overclock the 6200's memory just with stock cooling?

right. i shall try this things soon, but my actual gaming system has a modded 6800le, which has been and still is great

It isn't to much of a concern to e as the only games played on it are strategy ones.

I just wished i choose another GeCube 9550 XT for that machine, cause my bro has one and it came with the core at 432MHz!!!!

I found the cure!!!!!

STANG, thank u so much!!!

I have managed to download and install the 76.44 drivers, and that did it! I was able to overclock my core without problems!!!

I managed a final speed of:

CORE: 375MHZ to 430MHZ
MEM: 400MHZ to 478MHZ

So I gained 55MHZ in the core dept. I am happy, but I havn't run any gaming test for too long to notice any performance increases or problems like heating etc, yet. I did run Far Cry for about 4 minutes and found that the temp went up about a degree from 36C to 37C. So i'm not really worried about heat


anyway thank you stang!!!!!

yah when i went back to 76.44 drivers i could also overclock the core, but it made no improvement compared to just having the new drivers installed.

I got better performance with the new drivers and overclocking. even though i overclocked the core and mem on the old drivers performance couldn't meet up with the newest drivers so it was pointless.

I found a better cure. I was able to overclock by modifying the BIOS. I was a bit conservative. My 6200 was 350/400. In the BIOS, I updated to 410/530. In Windows, I have gone up to 600 and run tests.... at 410/530 I get almost a 20% increase in speed, which is pretty impressive. The memory seems to help a bit more than the GPU, I have found. At some point, perhaps I'll try to take the GPU a little bit higher... But with a BIOS change, it's a bit more risky than a CPU lockup. Don't wanna render my card useless.

I run Win98, Win2k, and WinXP, and linux on a multiboot machine. I only needed to reinstall the drivers in WinXP.... Had to go to safe mode. My 3dMark2003 went from 2000 to almost 2500... I have coolbits set to take my memory to 550. Taking my memory to 600 gave me almost 2700.

I used NiBiTor 2.6 to extract/change the BIOS (only the GPU/Memory settings) and nvflash 5.13 to shove it back in.

My card has a small passive heatsink on the GPU.... And no ramsinks on the memory... Not sure I wanna pay to put a fan on the GPU for a $50 card, but a few ramsinks might be nice, since I've found the RAM to be a better performance booster anyway... And safer to change.

-H

Can you tell me how to overclock by modifying the bios? I have a bfg6200oc and I know it has a lot of potential for overclocking. I don't want to use old drivers because the new ones should perform better.

Get the program NiBiTor 2.6... Use that program to extract the BIOS from your card. Back it up. Then change ONLY the settings for GPU and Memory speeds. Save this file. Then you use nvflash (in dos mode) to flash the bios back. At your own risk, of course.

The NV44 in conjunction with drivers newer than about 76.44 seem to halt the system if any core clock speed over 350 is attempted. Even setting 351 will halt the system -this is not a voltage issue I can assure you. Stang touched upon this already. I'm talking about the Newer 6200's with the NV44 NOT the first batches that has the nv43 which has been proven to overclock easily.

Using the 76.44 driver I was able to overclock the nv44 core to speeds over 400 easily using coolbits, Rivatuner or NiBiTor. Even if you use NiBiTor to overclock the core the system will halt during boot into XP if you're using the newer Nvidia drivers (81.xx) -this makes me suspect that somehow the driver is involved in some way as the system is fine when booting off a floppy after setting 400/600 in the firmware.

The strange thing is I got performance within less than 1.9% of an overclocked core and memory 400/600 using 76.44 vs. just overclocking the memory to 600 and using 81.87 (stock core of 350 as 81.xx won't allow overclocking). So why should I bother spinning up the core when the newer driver works virtually as well at stock core speeds?

To me it seems that Nvidia has done something to the driver to check what the core speed should be and halt on any difference which sounds like a crappy thing to do. I bought this bargain card for $60 and figured I'd push it to the max and if it fries, so what. 81.xx seems like a good driver set for the nv4A/nv44 6200, it would have been nice to be able to overclock it with these new drivers.

My card is a Kaser 6200 /128/ AGP nv44 A1 core. If you own a 6200 with the nv44 and your system halts when you try to increase core speed you now know why. Your choices are to revert to 76.44 and spin it up, or just OC the memory and stick to the newer driver. Performance is very close so it's up to you.

If I ever find a way to OC the core with the latest drivers I'll be sure to post the info.

Right... I overclocked the core via firmware and am using the latest drivers... That's why I posted that my solution was better.

Doesn't work that way with my nv44 A1. Even if I OC the core through the firmware the system halts in XP using 81.4 + drivers.

I have since tested up to 81.33. This seems to be the latest revision that allows OCing the core. After that memory only, at least with my NV44 A1 GPU.

ok i have a pny geforce 6200, it is 64-bit interface nv44, (A1, 4x1,3vp) 128mb ram. i was wondering to overclock this do ihave to use 76.44 drivers, and is my card able to unlock the extra 4 pipes to make it 8x1

is it safe to run a card (bfg 6200 oc ) that stock was 345 clock core and mem was 450. now clock core is 700 and mem is 800. my friend told me it should be fine as long as it doesnt overheat.

As long as there are no artifacts or overheating issues it should be okay.

Your core seems a bit high, you sure you got it to 700?