Should I overclock my GF3?

[Pitspawn]

I've had a Hercules geforce3 for less than a week. Every review i've ever read has overclocked the card from the start. Each manufacturer seems to put excessive cooling methods on each card.

I can go from 200/460 to 220/520 w/o artifacting. But I ask this question...

Is it worth it?
(How long will a GF3 last oc'd to these levels with their default cooling?)

[Morphoius]

I don't think anything bad could happen to it. it would crash long before it would burn up. i have one and have it overclocked to 240/540. depends on what you play, but most games won't have much change in framerate when overclocked. dosn't really matter when going 90 to 100 FPS. if you don't real confortable then only oc it when showing off friends through benchmarks and leave it at normal otherwise.

[WillysNut]

The biggest reason I could think of to OC a beautiful card like that is to test how good it works. A card that awesome in stock form is probably all you need for today's games.

However, I usually OC my video cards when I'm using Winamp viz studio...a true video card killer IMHO. If you have a fairly large monitor 17"+, Winamp is so fun. Try it out...I bet you get some killer frame rate increases....Of course I reccomend additional cooling.

BTW, check out this article....they talk about OC'in two cards and the need for Core clock OC in 16bit....and Core AND Memory OC in 32bit. Long article...page 3 has all the good stuff...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/video/geforce3/index3.html

[ReTiCuLeX]

I would overclock but i could only get up to 225/525 stable most my games would run at 240/540 but when i tried Tribes 2 omg I had tons of problems at higher then 225/525 I would freeze up,my screen would turn different colors while playing it etc....Tribes 2 is the best test game to see if ur overclock will work out good or not.

ReTiCuLeX G)Ds

[Mac42]

Overclocking the GeForce3 actually gives "noticable" results. The only possible problem I can think of is memory damage. Some past cards have had to underclock their ram below defaults because they ran it too high for too long. I've found the best memory test is the DraGothic test in 3DMark2k1... it seems to show artifacts WAY before any other game. I usually run a few loops of it to test my settings. After raising my I/O voltage I can get my VisionTek GF3 stable at 225/520 (I can get another 5-7Mhz out of the core by adding a fan on the backside of the chip).

-=mac=-