Overclocking

Of course with most videocards we can do some easy tricks to boost the overall performance a little. It's called overclocking the videocard and by increasing the frequency of the videocards memory and gpu we can make the videocard increase it's calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less then a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase that frequency any higher then 5-10% of the core and memory clock. Example, if your card would run at 100 MHz then I suggest you don't increase that frequency any higher than 110 MHz.

More advanced users push that frequency often way higher. Usually when memory starts to show white dots 'snow' you should go down 10 MHz and leave it at that. The core can be somewhat different. Usually when you are clocking to hard it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. I recommend that you back down at least 10-15 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact or issue.

All in all .. do it at your own risk. Overclocking your card too fast or constantly to it's limit might damage your card and it's not covered by your warranty however widely supported by most manufacturers.

You will benefit from overclocking the most with product that is limited or you may called it 'tuned down'. Now then, we know that this silicon is likely more powerful then it's memory can handle. Therefore by increasing the memory frequency we should be able to witness some faster results.

good active cooling for the GPU and ramsinks on the memory help

Let's boost the core frequency of this card also a little and take it for a test-drive .. First thing you need to do to overclock a videocard is downloading one of our fine tweak utilities which you can grab in our stacked download section.

One needs to seriously wonder why you want to overclock this card, but hey .. for the performance freaks among us we'll give it a good go. The core of the graphics card is default clocked at 275 MHz. Memory in total is 128 MB DDR SDRAM and clocked at 2x275=550 MHz.

The card was able to be pushed reasonably far memory wise. The results (while remaining stability and image quality) was good for 310 MHz for the core and a nice 630 (2x 315) MHz for the memory. The results can differ per card and system though, so this is not a guarantee for your results. Let's do some performance numbers at default and overclocked settings.

It's not much of a noticeable gain, but more than plenty for now.