Hi,I hope you can help me out with this, its a pretty simple question that I havent found the answer for. Is there really a big difference(hardware,bios..) between the core version and other versions(SC,FTW..) with higher clocks? I am wondering because I just ordered a evga gtx 280 core version and some people have overclocked it up to 670(FTW clocks)without doing any mayor changes...so paying more for a higher clocked version doesn't seems right unless you don't know how to overclock it or is it something with the warranty? Anyway any helpful info is really apreciated.
Buy stock & overclock it yourself, just my opinion. There is no difference except for a little BIOS change. You may/may not get a higher quality piece of hardware, but in my experience I've been able to hit the FTW/SSC clocks on all my stock cards no problem.
Yeah thats actually what I plan on doing, but still what could they change? thermal paste? what? I am really curious about it......because paying $75(core vs FTW) for something you can do seems...weird. Anyway biggerx thanks for the replying....but still if anyone knows exactly what really changes, it would be cool to know.
I'm running my SSC daily at 729/1566/2484 For benching I run it at 759/1620/2538 on air. Stock clocks are 648/1404/2322 So you can see the SCC version is an overclocking monster. If I was watercooling, I'm sure I could hit 800mhz and over 2600 memory easy. Right now I've got the top single GPU score here for 3Dmark06 and 3DmarkVantage. Dang....just looked it up. They don't sell my model anymore...bummer. In a way you are right but if you want the fastest with more OC headroom and those few extra frames you go with the factory OC versions and spend a few more bucks. So there isn't really a right answer. The right answer is what is right for you, what makes you happy and what you want to accomplish with your system.
They bin the chips based on speed. In other words, when they are manufactured the individual GPU and memory chips are tested and binned according to the speed they attain. The faster chips are used in the OC versions of the cards.
