VIDEO CARD FAQ GUIDE V.025

This guide is clearly neccesary due to all the stacking stickies relating to anything about video cards. Most of this is community contributed so if you feel you can offer to this FAQ feel free to post it here and if I dont happen to notice it PM me or Sakor and when we have the chance we'll update the guide. Excuse the poor worksmanship on the guide since we cant all be blessed like Sakor when it comes to this kind of stuff Somewhere down the line I'll clean it up a bit so the newcomers can clearly understand the guides.

Table of Contents:

1. How To Guides
A) Geforce 7900GTX Upgrade Guide
B) Geforce 7800GTX Upgrade Guide
C) Hardware Modding for Cooler Videocards
D) Overclocking Geforce 7900GTX for Newbies

2. Where to Guides

3. Performance Index
A) The AUTHORITY on 7900GS Overclocking

4. Common Tools/Utilities/Drivers
A) Latest Tweaked Nvidia Drivers
B) DriverCleaner

5. Frequently Asked Questions... Answered!





HOW TO GUIDES
A) A lovely photo guide on how to UPGRADE YOUR Core Duo/Core 2 Duo 17 Inch Notebook (i9400/E1705/XPS M1710) with a 7900GTX 512MB guide provided by forum member: mbosys
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=151471
B) A lovely photo guide on how to UPGRADE YOUR Centrino (Pentium M) 17 Inch Notebook (i9300/XPS Gen2/M170) with a 7800GTX 256MB guide provided by forum member: Irobertus
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=113866
C) A photo guide on Hardware modding your videocard for better cooling provided by forum member: Mr. K6
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=125277
D) A simple guide to Overclocking your Go 7900 GTX provided by forum member: hammermd
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=154583





~WHERE TO GUIDES~

PERFORMANCE INDEX
A) A well done breakdown of benchmarks and The AUTHORITY on Overclocking the 7900GS /benchies/guide provided and maintained by forum member: FlashSTV
http://www.notebookforums.com/thread157393.html





COMMON TOOLS/UTILITES/DRIVERS
A) For peak performance (tweaked) Drivers you can tweaked video drivers here from NBF (MobileForce), authored by: Fenuxx
http://www.notebookforums.com/thread206047.html
Alternatively you can hit up the infamous laptopvideo2go which updates and keeps track of every possible release along with an easy to install inf file to go along with each one.
www.laptopvideo2go.com
B) A simple tool used to wipe your system of any trace of an older driver
http://www.drivercleaner.net/





FAQ ANSWERS
Questions frequently asked around the forum, this post, PMed and such will likely end up here and If I or Sakor do no not know the answer for it then likely a kind and knowledgeable user will input for us so feel free to ask away and watch for an answer here however do not hesitate to use the search function to search our extensive database of materials already available.

Q) What is Overclocking? Will it Increase my performance by like 100%? What are the Pros/Cons of Overclocking?

A) Overclocking is basically running your chip wheather its video or cpu at a higher rating then what the manufacturer intends. Since all chips are NOT created equally the results of overclocking vary greatly on many factors suchs as when the chip was made, where it was made, room temperature, and any other measures taken to improve succes such as custom heatsinks or applying high grade thermal grease. The amount of performance expected is dependant on how far you can overclock so if you had a videocard that ran at 200 Mhz Core and 200 Mhz Ram and you Overclock to 250 Mhz for both then you would assume the increase in performance is roughly about 25% which is typically true for most hardware. The performance gained would come at the cost of stability because as I stated before not all chips are created equally. Companies that make these chips chose the clockspeeds they did mostly because its the safest speed they have obtained without problems on there cards/cpus thus why you should typically not go above the suggested 5-15% overclock that most people will advise. The general rule of thumb for overclocking is to take it one step at a time even 1Mhz at a time if you must to ensure you dont go overboard and then suddenly FRY your chip. The benefit of overclocking are pretty obvious because there is only 1 benefit and that is more speed. The downside could be pretty bad leading from damaged/dead cards and in a worst case scenario a fire hazard!.




























More

cmon, first! Good idea!

http://www.drivercleaner.net/

This is a good utility to use when updating and changing video card drivers. It will completely wipe the old ones.

For free FPS counter (to see what your tweaks do):
http://www.fraps.com/

I've asked this before but got few responses. This sounds like the perfect place to try again:

Can you overclock the vanilla 6800 Go 256 MB card for the i9300? If so what performance increase might I expect?

Thanks ...

Yes, download rivatuner and some modded drivers and you can do it.

You should be able to get around 4500 in 3dmark05 with overclocking; one or two have hit 5k.

Great topic! Repped.

Thank you mzimm, you answered my question in a few short words.

I'm indeed quite active, and I've just released a new driver... XTreme-G MobileForce 91.28-v2.40

Hey Tony *GASP* I see I need to update

awesome thread!

Anyone else think it would be nice to have a comparison of differnt drivers? Would someone with a 7800vanilla and some free time help contribute some 3dmark06 scores at stock voltage?
@250/658
laptopvideotogo 87.08......2168
geforcetony's 84.56......2155

E1705 1.8 w1GB ram - NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800

BIOS version: A01 BIOS date: 03/17/2006
SODIMM Socket 'DIMM_A': 512 MB (533 MHz)
SODIMM Socket 'DIMM_B': 512 MB (533 MHz)

2124 all stock drivers turning AV off (all tests leave 55+ processes)
2128 all stock drivers keeping fans on at least most of the time
2163 with 87.08 drivers (vid2go) 73degC after test ended fans on most of time
2178 with the below mentioned 91.28-v2.40 from GeForceTony - stock clocks and fan speed

I have a 9400 with 7900gs dual pipe, and I wonder how far can I clock it? or how far is still safe and still get a little boost from orginal settings?

Do these drivers work for the 7900 GS?