Performance - Overclocking

Performance - 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. Look carefully and observe well.

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.

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 graphics core is likely more powerful then what we have seen in the previous benchmarks. Therefore by increasing the memory and core frequency we should be able to witness some higher performance results.

Will the cooling solution help cooling down the graphics card enough for a nice overclock ?

As I stated in the beginning of this review, the core of the Ti 4200 graphics card is normally clocked in 3D mode at 250MHz, it's already standard at 275 MHz. Memory in total is 128 MB DDR memory and clocked at 2x275(550) MHz

The card was good for a nice overclock and precisely at GeForce4 Ti 4600 specifications. The results (while remaining stability and image quality) was 300 MHz for the core and 650 MHz for the memory. We did a few test runs:

As you can see the results are very nice. In Quake III 1600x1200 we bumped up from 126 towards 143 FPS while Aquamark gains another 5 FPS in that resolution. It's a good overclocker, especially the core frequency produces good results that show themselves off at GeForce4 Ti 4600 level, anything higher will make the card produce artifacts and make it unstable.