Introduction

Desk Space

In an attempt to add even more clutter to my already messy desk, I have sacrificed my remaining desk real estate to set up my own personal test system. (I had been saving the space for a free hamster range, but breaking Brandon's hamsters out has proven difficult thus far.)

Having your own test bed is great. I highly recommend setting up a test system of your own. I can now run benchmarks from the comfort of my own desk. I laugh at Sarju and Brandon whenever one of them to make that twenty foot trek to our main FS test area. Suckers.

The only problem is that I don't need to run benchmarks very often anymore since I don't have the time to write many articles (as hardware EIC it's my job to manage the site, and bug hardware companies for product). So why do I have a test system? First: because I can, and second: because it's nice to have one just in case I get curious.

You see, having a test system gives you the power to perform hardware experiments. If I ever wanted to know how say… a Celeron 2 compared to a Coppermine Pentium 3 of the same speed, I can find out.

We often run hardware tests for curiosity's sake, but it just so happens that if we're curious about something there's a good chance that our readers would also like to see our results. That's how many of our articles come about.

GeForce 2 Overclocking

I've never been sold on video card overclocking. Yes, I've overclocked plenty of video cards, but all the benchmark results I've seen have never been spectacular. Sure, you might pick up a couple frames, but the gains always pale in comparison to the framerate increase obtained by a successful CPU overclock.

As a result, I currently don't overclock my video card, but I do overclock my CPU. Have things changed now that we have cards with T&L?

Does overclocking your video card really help? How much does overclocking the core help? How about the memory? I decided to put my test bed to use, and answer these questions for myself.

Note that this article isn't an overclocking round-up of all the GeForce 2 cards out there. This is mainly a test of the effectiveness of video card overclocking -just one GeForce 2 card and a couple different core and memory speed combinations.