Is a GF2 32MB overclock worth it?

[tonsillectomy]

I've had a Guillemot GeForce2 32MB for the past year or so, and it's served me well so far. Lately I've been playing a lot of Urban Terror and have been wishing I was pushing out a few more FPS. I've never attempted to overclock this card, and I'm really tmepted to. Would it be worth it? How big of a performance increase am I looking at? Would it be worth it to add heatsinks to the RAM and put on a chip cooler? I've heard the blorb is crap, I would be fine with epoxying a small socket heatsink on there if anyone has any reccomendations.

[Staz]

You came here to ask us if overclocking is worth it?

I think we may be a little biased but...... YES

Warning!!!!
This will void your warrenty and may dammage your card.

Get some better cooling for your GPU and ram. Then goto someplace like www.tweakfiles.com and get 3Dmark2001 and a video card overclocking utility like nvmax or powerstrip.

Run 3Dmark2001 and see what you get. Then install your overclocking utility and raise your ram speed by 2MHz then run 3Dmark2001 again and see what you get. Keep doing this until your screen starts to screw up while running the bechmark. Then back it off about 4 MHz.

Then do the same thing with the GPU.

[mrpcman]

if your up to it, then why not? you'll get better performance.

[Monaco]

Of course you have to overclock your card!!! look at it this way- there may be some untapped speed in your card just going to waste. You paid for it, might as well use it!!

Depending on the resolution you use, you might get up to 25% free speed increase.

Stick some heatsinks on that bad boy and get to it!!

[tonsillectomy]

The thing I'm wondering is if spending $20-50 on epoxy, ramsinks, and a socket cooler is worth the FPS gain. How much of an increase with stock cooling am I looking at? With sinks?

[mrpcman]

5 for thermal epoxy, and use any S7 HS lying around.

[Monaco]

$20-50??? No way, the whole idea is to take advantage of the FREE SPEED waiting for you. If money is tight, think twist ties, not epoxy. Think lapping- sand paper is cheap!! Goto a computer store, see if they have ANY extra Heatsinks to sell cheap, maybe free!! I got my RAMsinks that way- a free, old S370 sink cut into 4 chunks. I hate to say it, but even Radio Crack might get the job done.

Speed gain really depends on reasolution. My GTS is at 410 mem, 250 core. At 1024x768, I get a no 3Dmark2k1 gain. At 1600x1200, I get more like 25% gain. Depends on if you card is limited by a slow CPU or not. Mine, obviously, is. That extra 5FPS could be what saves you from getting fragged, or make that barely playable game playable.

BAM!

[tonsillectomy]

I've actually got a Socket heatsink that came with my Duron 750 lying around. OEM CPU, the guy at the local computer store always throws them in. Still, if it's enough to run a 750MHz CPU stable it should work well on a video card :) I'll see what he has that's smaller that I can use on the RAM. I'm about to butcher a case, and I need a couple more fans so I'll probably order the epoxy with that. I'd rather use epoxy, 0 chance of it falling off and killing my card :)