Overclocking Gpus

[caravel]

That's all nice and dandy but such overclocking needs a lot of money and people who have that much cvan afford to always buy the newest hardware anyway. And what is the sense of breaking the guarantee to get 300 instead of 100 fps in Quake 4? If it burns, it costs you even more, I once forgot to remove the plastic cover underneath a new CPU cooler so I have made a painful experience which I don't want to repeat.

Exactly. It is often cheaper to buy new hardware than it is to invest in all of the equipment necessary to OC your existing hardware. To be honest I think the days of OC are long gone. CPUs are no longer all about clockspeed, graphics card GPUs are going the same way. On the whole there is alot of myth and legend surrounding OCing. You will find plenty of reports of the successes but few about the failures. Also those that went through the process and spent the money to get an extra 10 fps for an hour before it crashed and they had to back the clock speed off again, will rarely tell you that. They set out to gain 2GHz or more from a 1.8GHz cpu but only got it up to 1.9GHz (+100Mhz). This is the reality of OCing not the tall tales of tripling or doubling the clock speed. The old Radeon 9xxx softmods were often worthwhile and back in the day some of the old celerons could be very substantially overclocked, the rest is a myth or a passtime for curious hobbyists.