As submitted to http://acanac.org/blogs/geek/

In my gaming system, I am currently running an eVga GeForce 7800GT as my video card.  The card has been faithful to me for a couple of years now, but it's starting to show its age.  When UT3 was released, I started to see the deficiencies in my system as a whole.  It's not just the video card, my cpu and ram are starting to reach the end of their useful life.  The rest of the system is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and 3GB of mix and match ram (2 Corsair 1GB in Dual Channel mode and 1GB of unbranded memory).  Windows Vista ranks the hardware relatively high, but I know it's getting to be time to move on.  A couple of weeks ago, I embarked on a mission of great importance.  I decided to overclock my video card in an attempt to improve my gaming performance and prolong the purchase of new equipment.

Be warned - this is not for the faint of heart.  Overclocking can destroy your hardware.  I had a friend who overclocked a CPU and one day his CPU stopped working.  Seems it had heated a little too much.  The overclocking process is quite simple and can be done using the nVidia Control Panel.  Under the Performance section, open 'Adjust GPU Settings'.  My stock settings for the video card are 445Mhz Core Bus and 1070Mhz Memory Bus.  The new settings that I am using are 480Mhz Core Bus and 1201Mhz Memory Bus.  These settings seem to be stable.  I might be able to push a little more through it, but this is doing the trick.  I am also running a stock cooler on the card.  Using the nVidia Monitor, the card idles at about 48 degree Celsius and peaks at about 70 degrees Celsius during UT3.

Performance is definitely noticeable in game.  I have the settings turned up fairly high and am enjoying the prolonged useful life I have given my old video card.  The irony is that overclocking ultimately shortens the physical life of the hardware.