Yes we lost some posts

[cassiraa]

By forcing say, a 128mb video card to run faster/hotter, would that make it perform higher than it's supposed to, at about 150-175mb ?

Well, the MB refers to the amount of onboard ram on the card.

If you have, say, a Geforce Fx5500 128mb card, It runs at 270MHz. BFG Tech, for example, overclocks it before it leaves the warehouse to 290MHz [safe overclocking]. You can crank it up to 340 or 350 before the card curls up into the fetal position and begs for no more.

[SephYuyX]

Basically you increase the voltage to the CPU [or video card or w/e] and it forces the device to run faster than it was made to, And usually makes the hardware burn out faster, and run hotter but faster.

You can change your clock frequencies in your motherboard for your CPU or using Coolbits for your video card. ^^

By forcing say, a 128mb video card to run faster/hotter, would that make it perform higher than it's supposed to, at about 150-175mb ?

The mb on a vid card is actually not all that important, specially in games like FFXI, there will be very little difference in a 128 vs 256 for ex, the other features are what counts.

And overclocking is a real dumb idea in general, even if you have the hardware that is capable of it.

[Khamsin]

Basically you increase the voltage to the CPU [or video card or w/e] and it forces the device to run faster than it was made to, And usually makes the hardware burn out faster, and run hotter but faster.

You can change your clock frequencies in your motherboard for your CPU or using Coolbits for your video card. ^^

By forcing say, a 128mb video card to run faster/hotter, would that make it perform higher than it's supposed to, at about 150-175mb ?

Well, that's memory capacity, which has nothing to do with "faster".

"Faster" applies to processor and bus speeds (i.e. hertz not bytes).

[Lithiani]

You do have to be rather careful with overclocking with regards to online games. If you don't synchronise the clock speeds correctly, you can end up with a situation where the games client side synch becomes out of phase with the server side synch, because 3D position referencing uses client side settings to determine position (everyone should realise this, it's the basis of software flee hacks).

The upshot of this is that you can achieve the equivalent of a permanent flee hack with certain settings of overclocking. You can also (if you screw it up in a different way) have a permanent gravity hack instead. All of this is extremely noticable, and not something you can turn on or off at will. I used to admin a server for a half-life mod, and believe me, it's REALLY obvious when this is happening from a server side perspective. When it happens once or twice you have to allow for the possibility of a lag occurance. When it is a permanent feature, you will be caught.

Unless you actually know what you are doing with overclocking, don't.

[cassiraa]

If you don't synchronise the clock speeds correctly

Key line quoted. Definatly do all the research you can and if you're new to it, follow a good walkthrough with someone who's done it before. IMHO it's not really 'dumb idea' or such if you overclock by a relativly safe amount, and do it properly.

[Lithiani]

/nod

I'd just rather people didn't try it and then blame other people when it could have been avoided. One of the other guys in my building had his machine overclocked, and it was causing this same issue. He got a 3 day suspension, and it could have been much worse, thankfully the GM was in a good mood and was prepared to accept it was a genuine mistake (especially because he could log on to a different, unoverclocked machine, and move at normal speed).

Also, don't trust the commercially available overclocking software, or some of the overclocking monitors that are available. The automated process they use is falliable, and does not guarantee this won't happen. In my friends case, he had the overclocking monitor running and later found out that it was the monitor software that was desynching the clock speeds and causing the issue

So if you are going to overclock, be careful, as you don't want to get unintentionally banned.