With a little help from the good folk on this forum, I've just upgraded to a BFG 8800 Ultra. First thing I did was run 3D Mark 06 which gave me a credible score of 10661. But I know people with lesser cards/specs who are scoring higher. Without doing anything drastic like overclocking/watercooling/buying more gear.... how can I improve my performance?
 
System Specs:
 
Q6600 2.4Ghz Quad
BFG 8800 Ultra
2Gb DDR2 RAM
500Gb HDD
Windows XP
 
Cheers,
 
Greg

Make sure you have good airflow, and oc everything you can. Find the peak your cpu will give you, the same for your card. Start tweaking, youll be surprised. Get some apps thatll read your temps. Core temp for your cpu . Ill bet your scores go up over 20%

3DMark 06 is CPU bound these days, overclocking that Q6600 will net you a gain of at least a couple thousand points if I recall correctly. This is 3DMark though, real games won't show near as much of an improvement. Still, running that Q6600 at 3.2GHz on a 400MHz FSB with the RAM in a 1:1 ratio would be a smart move if your motherboard can handle it.

Oh and one more thing if you don't mind me asking. How much did you pay for that 8800 Ultra? Just wondering

I got the 8800 Ultra Second hand off ebay for £185 ($USD360).
 
I've also bought and installed a TPQ850 PSU to power it, and added a 120mm and 2x80mm case fans to keep the cooling up.
 
I've never done any overclocking before. Is there an idiots guide somewhere that anyone can recommend?

Go to the cpu forums, theres some there, and alot of infor for your cpu. Or go to oc forums, cpu there, but also look up oc 3d chips

The idiots guide is Here.
Nothing hard to do.
For a basic overclock, change your FSB from 266Mhz to 333Mhz, set your CPU voltage to 1.325V and make sure your RAM is at it's stock settings.  To push it a little further, you will probably want to upgrade your CPU cooler.  Not really hard to overclock.  Just give it some extra voltage and turn up the FSB    
I would agree that 3.2Ghz, 400Mhz * 8, with your RAM 1:1 with the FSB would be a great place to have it.  You could probably hold this overclock stable very close to stock voltage.

Can you check that hyperlink outlw6669?
 
'That URL is not valid and cannot be loaded'.
 
Thanks heaps for all your help everyone, less intimidated by overclocking now. Will investigate....

Woops!  Forgot to paste the link    
Now it is fixed!