Stex Toys

Overclocking is a process by which you tell PC components to run faster than they otherwise would. As you will have seen PC’s will have a speed rating such as 2.5Ghz which define how quickly they can run computations, the higher the number the faster they can get things done. These speeds are not set hard though so you can tell them to run at a higher speed, however the faster something tries to run the more power it requires, so you can only push it so far before you need to send more power (volts) through the component. With power comes heat however, and heat is the enemy of all computer components, so you will often find overclockers replacing the standard cooling elements with more advanced setups designed to excel at heat removal.

If you are interested in this subject and would like to learn more, and live in the UK, I highly recommend the monthly publication CustomPC which you can find in any decent newsagents, and also the associated website www.bit-tech.net

I started to get worried, thinking maybe I had just pushed the card so hard for so long it was finally giving out on me. It was at this time that the XBOX 360 came to stay and so I didn’t put much thought into my PC gaming for a while, and the card was fine in Windows/Linux for desktop use so I neglected to do anything about it for some time.

Eventually I wanted to return to a little PC gaming, and thinking that maybe what was happening was that the Heastsink and Fan (HSF) had maybe come loose, or the Thermal Interface Material (TIM) had dried out I figured I would give this ageing card one last look over to see what I could salvage. What I found was the result of 2-3 years of neglect of my card. The entire air-flow enclosure was clogged with dust and debris, no wonder this thing couldn’t stay cool the amount of cool air actually getting to the heatsink must have been minimal. While I was in here I figured I would remove the whole structure and apply some new TIM, as I had some spare AKASA Silver-3 lying around.

Putting it all back together and running though some benchmarks, I pushed my card way back up to speeds I hadn’t had in play since the card was new. I was once again able to get some decent frame rates even at my newer monitors 1920×1200 resolution, at least in Vales Source engined games that rely on a lot of CPU grunt, and for other titles I could run at 1280×800 with plenty of AA and AF to keep things looking nice.

So have I learnt my lesson? Probably not, but next time things start to play up a good bit of housekeeping will be my first line of defence!