Geforce3 & cooling solution

[baldurga]

I am a budget limited buyer, but I have manage to bought a second hand Gainward Geforce 3 VIVO at a reasonable price ($95), and it is clocked at 200/458 (I know, why the standard is 458 and not 460? Ask Gainward).

I want to protect this inversion as much as I can, and also overclock a little (don't want to go to extremes, don't want to fry the CPU!).

So, I am planning some options:

a) Buy a "slot bracket fan/turbine", put it the free PCI slot just under the graphic card to take the hot air out.

b) Replace the GPU's standard termal pad by a better termal compound solution, to increase heat transfer.

c) The same above aplied to RAM.

I don't know if all the solutions are recomended equally, or some provide better improvement than others. Which do you recomend I should do? Any other suggestions?

Finally, overclock it to 220/500 (about 10%) it'is safe? I don't know I can take more profit from GPU overclock or from RAM overclock. Any information will help (or links, doesn't matter).

Thank you for reading all this long post. And thank you in advance for your advice.


DIY: read, buy, test, learn, reward yourself!

 

[williamc]

such an oc is safe and should not require any aditional cooling. Do it by 5mhz at a time and when you start getting glitches, back it down a notch or two and be happy. Don't rebuild the entire thing just to OC it, isnt worth it.

The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the empires state building, along came goblin, wiped the spider out

 

[justinstraub]

I have an Asus geforce 3, i have it up to 250/520 using the cooling that came with it. I used riva tuner and just went up 5 mhz at a time. played a few games and kept upping the mhz until i saw artifacts in the games. I went down 5 once i saw artifacts and ran 3dmark to see how that worked. i did not do anything extra to cool it. and i dont think its to easy to fry the gpu because my younger brother accidently put the mhz on 300/690 and it just locked up, restarted and everything was ok.

 

[baldurga]

Thanks to both, now I am quite more confident. I'll make it the way you say it, 5Mhz each time and running some games to see what happens.

DIY: read, buy, test, learn, reward yourself!