3D Prophet II MX Cooling

[EzaGeza]

I have recently brought an Hercules 3D Prophet II MX, which i want to clock to high heaven. Unfortunately the card comes with a stock heatsink which I want to remove so i can replace it with an orb. Is there any way i can remove the heatsink from the chip without damaging anything. If not would the orb work ok glued with thermal compound to the top of the heatsink.

 

[Mac42]

Overclocking the core of a GeForceMX will get you absolutely nothing. The problem is that the core is faster than the RAM, so it has to sit around waiting for information, so if you raise the core speed you're not going to gain any fps. If you really want to overclock it then find a way to cool the RAM... overclocking those chips is where you'll see the performance increase, but then again it might only be a few fps.


-=mac=-

 

[EzaGeza]

Thanks Mac. I'll have a go at cooling the ram as well. I have also got another problem. Using standard Nvidia Ref Drivers with the coolbits tweak, the core clock and mem clock are reported wrong on reboot. The only way i can clock it is by using Powerstrip. Any Ideas?

 

[DennisC]

Mac42 (Apr 16, 2001 07:57 a.m.):
Overclocking the core of a GeForceMX will get you absolutely nothing. The problem is that the core is faster than the RAM, so it has to sit around waiting for information, so if you raise the core speed you're not going to gain any fps. If you really want to overclock it then find a way to cool the RAM... overclocking those chips is where you'll see the performance increase, but then again it might only be a few fps.


-=mac=-

Actually, you will certainly see some performance benefit from overclocking the core, it's just that the memory will shortly become a bottleneck and limit things. In other words, you will run out of memory performance before you run out of core performance.

The trick is to cool both (and for some reason cooling the GPU seems to help memory overclocking, probably by stabilizing the whole card), and get the maximum memory speed at a given maximum core speed.

Striking this balance of core and memory speeds with emphasis on the memory will give you your best overall overclocked performance. I will agree, though, that this performance increase is best measured with a benchmark. You might notice some increase in FPS in an actual game, but it will probably be less than 10 FPS and not visually significant.

 

[Mr B]

I've got an old s7 hs, that looks like if I cut it in half, will cover the ram chips quite nicely. Anyone else try this, and how well does it work??

Mr B