For some unknown reason some of us nuttier 3D gaming freaks are never satisfied with our lot- even after spending a cool $300 on a brand new and extremely fast 3D accelerator. So if 190fps in Quake 2 demo1.dm2 isn't enough for you, then yes it is possible to push that GeForce 256 that bit further. Overclocking video cards doesn't make life any easier on the 3D chip manufacturer, the OEM or on the card itself.. But NVIDIA knows that some gamers do like to tweak and overclock when given the opportunity to do so. Thus they've sneakily (a good thing BTW) included an overclocking slider, which is accessible via some Windows Registry tweaking. Just as NVIDIA needs to protect themselves, we need to as well. Therefor we do not recommend overclocking your GeFORCE 256 board, doing so can cause permanent damage and void your card's warranty blah, blah blah…. With that out of the way, here's how to access the overclocking slider within the 3.38 (and above) reference drivers. Simple run REGEDIT and locate this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak
Once you've done that you only need to edit the 'Coolbits' DWORD shown (below) from 01 to 03 and then once you reboot you'll have accessed NVIDIA's own overclocking utility.
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While no one who's had the opportunity to play crank up the clockspeed on a TNT2 or a Voodoo3 2000 is going to get excited about the extra 3% we coaxed out of our 301MHz DDR memory, we might get a wink for the 12.5% we cajoled out of our 120MHz core. But numbers aren't everything. At some point you have to walk the walk and our GeForce 256 DDR board overclocking wasn't too impressive in the lower resolutions but it did make a difference in the fillrate capabilities at 1600 x 1200 in Quake 2. An increase in framerate of over 12% at 1600 x 1200 is a nice bonus any day (except Tuesdays of course).
