SUMMARY: There are a lot of folks out there that love nVidia based video cards for the stunning performance they provide and continue to deliver with each new product release. But what video card would be complete without at least some overclocking to boost performance even more, without spending a single cent... Today Nick Swan shows us just how we can increase the performance of our nVidia based cards in this beginners guide to overclocking nVidia video cards.
Before we look at overclocking, I should point out what I am using, so you can compare results and see why your card has/has not got features mine does, especially with Anti-Aliasing and filtering methods.
The video card I own is a Hercules GeForce3 Ti200. The card is very close to the nVidia reference design, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but does mean it’s fairly feature thin. The stats of the card are:
As you can see, the card is certainly a standard, non-variation version. One thing Hercules has opted for is non-stock cooling. They have added a half sized Blue Orb and some RAM sinks. The RAM sinks are more than likely Thermaltake ones, as they look exactly the same including color and the chipset cooler is a Thermaltake product, so the heatsinks probably are too. On my card I replaced the chipset cooler with a full sized Blue Orb, which will help to overclock the core slightly higher. I’ll explain how to fit a new cooler a little later.
