Is O/Cing a 9700 Pro worth it?

[OC Noob]

If its limited by the CPU primarily is it really worth it to O/C the 9700 Pro for everyday gaming?


I recently set mine back to stock for this reason:

1) The O/C gave me only a small increase in 3DMark, while O/Cing the CPU 200 Mhz gave me much better results.

2) Risk of damaging the card (I'm not too worried about this, but why risk it for a marginal performance gain).

3) How the heck do people get scores of 17k+? What can you O/C to get that kind of score?



ps I'm not worried about 3DMark scores, I'm more interested in game performance gains, but have no accurate method to measure gaming performance gains, other than 3DMark.

 

[Hamburger]

If your games arent sluggish , I wouldnt overclock, unless your benching of course.

As far as damaging your card, its aweful hard t ruin a card by just upping the core and memory, your operrating system just dont like it and will boot you out, dont get me wrong you can ruin it but its rare. If its cool temp wise youll be fine.

Most of the people who burn up cpus or video cards are overvolting them. If your not upping the volts you probably have nothing to worry about.
Some will say o/cing shortens the life of video cards, this is true but how long do most people use a card before upgrading to a newer one?

 

[OC Noob]

All good points, but if the games run slugish are the slight gains that I'm seeing in 3DMark really going to improve performance in a game?

I'm interpreting my 3DMark scores like this: Only slight gains going from 325 to 365 core and 310 to 345 mem means I'm getting marginal gains in games also. All of this probably being due to CPU limitations.

Is this reasonable?