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Gaming Arena => Gaming and Technology => Topic started by: The Light on Jul 19 2007, 10:50 PM

Title: The wonders of overclocking.
Post by: The Light on Jul 19 2007, 10:50 PM

My video card is rather . . . well it's old and I wanna eek as much out of it as I can.  So, due to my lack of funds for a newer card I turned toward the wonders of overclocking.  I unlocked Coolbits (I have an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 by the way) and was about to tinker with it when I thought about frying my card like everyone warns you about.

My question is how do I know what a safe setting is, they tell you to up it slowly like by 5Mhz each time and test it but how do you test it properly?  I'd rather not fry it and have to buy a new one, I can't afford it. 0_o

Title: The wonders of overclocking.
Post by: Taoki on Jul 20 2007, 02:03 AM

Firstly, get an overclocking software like Riva Tuner, thats what I used. Certain video cards let you overclock them more while some let you less. I had Nvidia Geforce in the past, and they're more overclockable. If I remember right, it knows how to scan for the best values. If not, you can try overclocking more and more slowly until the image gets corrupt or the pc hangs up or restarts. Also, know that you may overclock it in windows and have it work fine, but in games it may get stressed more badly and corrupt the image there or cause problems.
If its the memory clock that's too overclocked, in games you will see surfaces getting offset the geometry and textures appearing at random and geometry shapes (like a car's headlight suddenly stretching to the sky). Unless that bothers you, its ok that way. The memory clock doesn't do much anyway so dun overclock it more then you need to. The core clock does indeed affect performance in fps drastically, but if you overclock it too much, you may get your video card too stressed and it may shut down or restart the pc. I played with these and never burned anything, but be warned that they can indeed burn a video card so do be careful with them. Thats mostly all about it I guess. There are other sub-settings of these too, but I didn't look into them much.

Title: The wonders of overclocking.
Post by: The Light on Jul 20 2007, 09:34 PM

Thanks! ^_^

I ended up bumping it up from 250/400 to 289/400.  Anything higher and it would hang up when there was a lot of detail and stuff on screen.  Heh, on one of my games Windows even shut down and told me it got stuck in an infinite loop.  :o  Well, it seems to run a bit better now.

Now if only I could just convince my parents to get me a new card entirely . . . .  Meh, I can dream.