I realise this is slightly off-topic for a unicycling forum, but I had to tell someone…
I’ve been overclocking my vidoecard a lot lately. It all started about 4 months ago when I inherited my brother’s comp. Inside was a Pentium Pro 200 overclocked to 233 (which is part of our folding team, #13392…). There was also an old 8 MB TNT2 videocard. “Well,” I thought to myself, “Now that I own this stuff I can overclock it without worrying my brother.”
Now Jon, my brother, was not and is not totally against overclocking. He himself set up a custom watercooling unit for his Duron 600. He had that up to 1000 mHz at one point. Granted, his computer was unstable, but it ran.
Okay. This videocard was running at 125 mHz core speed and 143 mHz RAM speed stock. I have it at 157 mHz and 180 mHz for core and RAM, respectively. This is a 26% and 27% increase in speed. All this and with only the stock heatsink and a 50mm fan over the core, and an 80mm fan blowing over the whole videocard! This is the most stable overclock I have ever seen.*
At this speed, playing the intro to Deus Ex at 640 x 480 multiple times in a row does not make it hot at all! It was as if it wasn’t even on. One could hold their finger on the heatsink all day. It is for this reason that I have decided to push the envelope. I’m fairly sure I can reach 165-170 mHz and 185-190 mHz for the core and RAM, respectively, using the same cooling as I am now.
If anyone has any other overclocking experiences I would enjoy hearing them as well. Thank you for reading this. Forums are a nice place to vent. My mom has been getting tired of me telling her about my overclocked videocard. 
*I did have to reinstall my display drivers twice because video would not play properly, but it is perfect now.
Interesting, but that overclocked video card is not going to improve your Folding@Home performance so I fail to see any benefit. 
I think I finally managed to fix an annoying problem with the Blue Screen of Death. My computer has been crashing at random times a couple times per month. It has been inconvenient, but the worst part was that the crashes would usually cause me to loose my work in process for Folding@Home.
Since the crashes were rather random it was hard to pin down the cause. I updated various drivers and updated other suspect programs like my virus checker. But the crashes continued. Finally I removed the Plextor Manager 2000 software that came with my Plextor CDRW drive and the crashes seem to have stopped. The Plextor software had some nice features, but if it causes the computer to blue screen it’s gotta go. Finally, I think my computer is stable again (knock on wood). Plextor Manager 2000 and Windows 2000 don’t get along well with each other.
My Folding should now be able to continue uninterrupted by those pesky blue screens (knock on wood).
Well John, it just seems that I’m too poor to upgrade my old computer at this point… BUT my brother upgraded his comp to an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz. We have consolidated user names so unisteve will rise in the ranks. Mwahahahah. My dad also recently upgraded to a 1.3 GHz Duron and I’m trying to get him to join the team.
I have made my overclocking goals, but I still believe I can go further. My core speed is now 165 mHz and my RAM speed is 191 mHz. I can hardly believe it. Even at these speeds I can still hold my finger on the heatsink when playing 3D games. I’m almost certain I can go to 170 and 200 mHz for core and RAM. (It seems that with these high clock speeds I have to reinstall my display drivers every time I set a new speed or else video will not play properly. Oh well. )
I downloaded a utility that will tell you your framerate in any Direct 3D game, so I will try that out. It’s at this page:
http://www.planetquake3.net/tweak/download_index.html . It is called Fraps 1.2b and it is located about halfway down the page. I have yet to try it so I will report back later with my findings.
I also stumbled across a case study done about OC’ing TNT2 videocards. It was quite interesting and useful in determining how far I can afford to push my videocard. It is located here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/tnt2-overclock.html
Oh yes. I’m off to check that utility out then. (You know what? I think “mHz” needs a capital “m”. Oops.)
Success!
I now have my videocard clocked at 165 MHz core speed and 194 MHz RAM speed. This is not as high as I predicted, but it is a considerable increase in speed over the stock settings. Based on my calculations, it was a 34% increase in speed of the RAM and a 32% increase in speed of the core. I believe that this is about as high as I can take this card without spending some money on cooling.
With the RAM clocked at 200 MHz, I couldn’t run any 3D games. With it at 198 MHz there was severe artifacting in Windows, and at 196 there was significant artifacting in Deus Ex. When I lowered the speed to 194 there was no artifacting in Windows or in Deus Ex.
Bearing this in mind, I MAY be getting a 32 MB Voodoo 3 videocard (for free!). I have already downloaded tweaking software which will enable me to overclock and adjust all kinds of settings. That is, if I get the card.
Overall, I am pleased with my videocard and realise that it is old, so I don’t expect really great things from it.
You know that utility? It doesn’t work as well as I might have hoped. It had a little window that showed the number of frames per second, but the numbers were too big for the window. You could usually see what the numbers were, though. I’m not sure if it was the resolution I was running it at or what. Anyway, for free and less than 300 KB, I can’t really complain.
That’s what I like to hear. 