Nvidia bans G80 overclocking

EVEN the water-cooled G80 cannot be overclocked. It has to be clocked at Nvidia's reference speeds as Nvidia is already pushing the chip to its limits. There is some overhead but not too much, and the last thing Nvidia needs and wants now is s bunch of fried G80 cards.

It would cause bad publicity and a lot of returns. One of the big problems is that there are not enough chips even for current supply, not to mention how long you would have to wait for RMA on a massive scale.

The decision has been made - all Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS remain at the default clock, but coolbit.reg still works. So the end user can have a bit of a fiddle if he or she really wants to.

Some Nvidia partners such as XFX, EVGA, BFG, Gainward get value from overclocking but Nvidia has said a big no to them, over and over again.

Sooner or later someone will do a faster clocked version but not at this time. Even the water-cooled card built by BFG is clocked at the stock speed but you can overclock it at home. That is the whole point of water-cooled card isn't it? µ