Hey everyone. Just so you know, this is an "I have spare time and spare parts so lets tool around." exercise. I DONT excpect to be gaming with theese cards. OK now to the question. I have a couple of old PCI cards from around 1996 laying around and I have my old Pavilion up and running ready for mucking around, at the moment I can game quite comfortabley with a 2Mb Trident 'ProVidia 9685' PCI graphics card... When I say game I mean play Unreal Tournament at 640x480 at medium settings and play HL1 at 400x??? at what I am guessing is 18-30 FPS. I got wondering if it was possible to overclock these cards at all. I installed power strip and it shows that it runs at an incredible 57MHz for both the graphics core and memory I can change the slider but no matter what I set it to and then press apply I get the default "Ding" and it resets to 57MHz. Is this due to the Windows XP standard drivers or is it not possible to overclock these old beasts. Here are the cards I would like to see if I could overclock: Trident ProVidia 9685 2Mb S3 Trio 64V+ 2Mb SIS 86C201 1Mb? Are any of these cards overclockable? Let me say again I dont expect to be playing Oblivion and FEAR with these. Its just to get a kick and see what the old cards are capable of, If I could get the trident up to 60MHz with some cooling I would still say it was worth it, an extreme 3MHz! Are there any other programs that might be more appropriate than pstrip? Thanks for your time and any help. Mattwizz3 : ) Sempron 2600+ @ 2.2GHz 1Gb DDR400 Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe 200GB SATA 2X 80Gb IDE 256Mb MSI 6800 Ultra

You can try to use rivatuner to see if it works... But as far as those older card goes, some don't come with a heatsink.... TMP-Man Asus P5P800-SE PAT P4 506 @ 4009Mhz 1.3625v Thermaltake CLP0024 w/ 1700RPM 92MM + AS5 2GB OCZ 2-3-2-5 DDR400 120GB/300GB 7200RPM HD MSI 6600GT AGP 550/1100

i actually have a S3 Virge that i have plugged into my system near my new X1800XT. not sure which model it is seeing as i haven't really checked, but it seemed to run windows xp pretty well with its 2megs of vram, and yes this card doesn't have any kind of heatsink whatsoever. now that ive seen this post, im very interested in finding an overclocking tool to see what this baby can really do!! just for the record, i was useing this card before the X1800 to just use my new computer, when i had it built, i figured i could get a nice GPU for alot less money than were i got the system, and i was right. would have been like an extra 320 bucks for the X1800XT while i got it for 220. also just didn't feel like removing it from the system, it fills up some of the empty space seeing as i only have two other cards in there

well, i no longer have that perticular S3 Virge card working in perfect order. Powerstrip worked just fine in overclocking both the memory and core. before i attempted the overclock i took an old Pentium 1 processor cooling fan and rigged it onto the core. well i continued to up the speed and bam the card went crazy. good thing i shut down the comp fast so the damage was minimized to a few display problems aftter the next reboot. before i overclocked however i tried stock speeds of 57mhz on both the core and mem on the graphic intesive game magic carpet where i netted at least 60fps by the looks of it. im now going to attempt to rig on an old PentiumIII heatsink onto the core which should provide much more cooling power compared to the crappy little fan i put on before, i doubt ill be able to get it on though

Another brilliant plan.

Matt, have you lost your mind or do you feel the impossible just might take a little more time and advice? :) Skip

I have read somewhere that a guy overclocked his S3 Trio 64V+ from 57MHz to 80MHz and said he saw a 50% performance increace.. maby I could play HL1 at 640x480!! I have an old chipset heatsink which I could use to cool the beast! I dont beleive it is imposible, just dificult. Mattwizz3 : ) Sempron 2600+ @ 2.2GHz 1Gb DDR400 Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe 200GB SATA / 80Gb IDE 256Mb MSI 6800 Ultra