im thinking of oc'ing as much as I can safely, was going to try on the stock cooler but its allready pretty hot so im thining of getting an air cooler to replace it. But i just need to know if theres any point at all, Ive been looking at various benchmarks and im left a little confused. Some place I read that It would be around a 10-15% increas in performance from and OC, but then when I look at benchmarks of an 8800gtx vs an 8800 Ultra, I see only 1 fps increase- which to me isnt worth the hasstle.. what dont I understand?

in real game performance yes... in syntheics 8800 ultra actully beats out 8800 gtx by a notable amount

so if i bought a cooler for the card, and oc'd it to a decent amount, what kind of improvement in fps would i see in a modern game?

Uhhhhh...... Damn it.... My has stock cooler I can it to go to 940/1000 stable. And it shows few more frames in acullt games but up to maybe 700-800 more in 3dmark06

OC'ng is fine , so do it , check mine (its a pretty nice one )

also to itotallybelieveyou , 8800ULTRA beats 8800GTX , but the difference isnt noticeable, check some benchmarks

Srry... Typo was supposed to say in real game performance no. in syntheics yes and it does ultra beats 8800gtx by about 500 points in sm3.0 and 2.0 that's noticable to me

check the dx9 benchmarks here: http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 472,00.asp

it seems that the ultra gets between 4 and 9 fps roughley over the standard gtx. which seems pretty good and so its gunna be worthwile oc'ing my gtx

while you can get a pretty good overclock, even if you were to get a better cooler, you wont get a better overclock, the problem your having is
your reaching the limits of your current videocard bios settings, for a batter overclock, you will need to give the GPU a slight voltage increase for a higher overclock

PS when overclocking, overclock the GPU first, then overclock the memory if your using a program like rivatuner

the GPU generally overclocks better than the memory and overclocking one than the other will give you a better overclock

ok this doesnt work, the duorb that is. its worse than my stock cooler

Lol do you even need to overclock? What games are you playing?

Well OC'ng isnt just for getting performance , some parts of it is for fun and the joy it has , for example when u OverClock a CPU (i know his talking about GPU, but i am giving an example) from 2.4 to 2.6, the difference wont be much , but it has alot of fun and u will learn alot of things

Thats true, theres deffinatly some fun to be had. Anyway the games Im playing all need more performance. For example im playing World in Conflict, which was running pretty well but when i upgraded to a 22" screen, it didn't run as smooth which made me think of overclocking. Also for some reason company of heroes isnt running very well either, though it used to i think before they brought out the OF expansion, Or maybe its the 22" again. Supreme commander is another game with extremely high needs, Crysis soon. So basicly every game i play, except for half life2/tf2.

Dont expect to see alot of difference when u OC'd your card, because it may add some FPS, but dont excpet alot of gain in performance