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Overclocking & Tweaking
As most of you with videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.
What do we need?One of the best tools for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download here. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.
Where should we go ?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 500 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 25 to 50 MHz.
More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today tested cards anyway but we'll show it still ;)
All in all ... do it at your own risk.
Notice that the card uses one 6-pin power connector and one 8-pin, you can connect 2x 6-pin connectors and the card will work fine. But Overclocking will be disabled. So, you'll need to have a 6-pin and an 8-pin power connector to enable "Overdrive" or overclocking in generic. This is needed because overclocking will boost power draw, and you need the additional power from the 8-pin connector for a stable overclock.
Overclocking was really baffling. I decided to do it with the help of Rivatuner 2.0.5 I was amazed how far we actually could overclock. We were able to easily push the card to 2900 XT (750/825) speeds and then take it even a little further. Seriously, if you achive a succesful overclock then this is the cheapest 2900 XT money can buy ;)
Check it out, our maximum OC: We could overclock towards 848 MHz on the core and 900 MHz for the memory; nice! Let's have a look, as yes, we can squeeze even more performance out of your games.
Overclock results
Pretty darn sweet overclock, eh? You are looking at an 10 FPS increase on average here. If you play around with the fan RPM a little I'm confident you can take the graphics core even a notch higher.
