7600GT overclock?

I plan to reinstall Gothic 3 once Community Patch 1.70 is out,and I want to enjoy the most of it.I have an AGP Nvidia GeForce 7600GT with 256MB of memory,DDR3.
Do you think it is worth overclocking?
Last time I overclocked a GPU was back when I was playing Rome:Total War and I had some strange textures at the strategy map.
The question is if GPU overclocking is safe and worth the trouble for Gothic 3(taking into consideration it having countless hardware issues).

To be honest....no.

A 256MB 7600GT is going to struggle with a game like Gothic 3, or any newer game for that matter. The 7600 was a mid-grade card when it was released 3 years ago, I really don't think overclocking it is going to make much of a difference. You might want to start looking at some newer graphics cards.

No-go,I doubt it's buying and AGP card in 2009 is a wise investment and if I'm going to change my motherboard I'll also have to change RAM+CPU+PSU and while I'm on it replace my ridiculous 80GB HD.
I think you got the picture,I'm going to buy a new rig but I'll have to stick to the old one for some more time.

Anyway,I've read that an overclocked 7600GT can reach an 7800 and I want to get every FPS possible out of this junk.

Personally I would not recommend overclocking unless you're willing to accept the potential to fry your card- and thus have to buy a new one- especially since it is old. Having said that...

I've played G3 on my (factory) OCed 7600 at 1440x900, full details. That's PCIe and what was at the time a pretty decent system otherwise, plus it was a late model 7600 and non-reference cooler, Palit 7600GT Sonic, IIRC. It managed The Witcher and both STALKERS at 1440x900 at max settings (-Old Vizima, not full dynamic lighting for the Stalkers), and Bioshock at 1024x768 full details too. Note, I am tolerant of relatively low frame rates.

The funny thing was that there was relatively little difference in frame rate whatever resolution or detail level I set G3 to (except one thing- to do with grass I think), and of course the annoying pause every twenty seconds never went away.

I'd go with it. Use rivatuner. And Atitool to check for stability with that artifact finder thingie. And keep an eye on those temps. 7600GT should be able to play today's games just fine with lower res and mid settings. You could also buy an HD3850 AGP card to breathe some new life into your system. Just OC the crap out of that 7600GT, and if it goes well - good for you. If you end up frying it (not likely if you're careful, they tend to display artifacts and crash before frying) cough up some dough for a faster AGP card - i recommend the hd3850.

There are many good OC tutorials on the net. Once you find a nice stable overclock you might wanna look into re-flashing the GPu bios with those new settings to avoid the hassle with all those software tools and registry in windows at startup.

I had an 7600GS with which I played Two Worlds. I overclocked it...big time.... and I remember getting a significant fps increase in two worlds, in fact, so much that I increased the details for a bit.

If you've got an older XP system, I recommend taking a look at that freeware thread in these forums for a couple of usefull tweaking tools to make that system run optimally.

Also, your card seems to have DD3 memory, which might mean that you can OC that videoram too quite nicely. On the 7600GS model, I hit the wall with ddr2 memory quite early.

JDR13 said:

A 256MB 7600GT is going to struggle with a game like Gothic 3, or any newer game for that matter.

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Worked fine for me, the game was definitely playable. Of course, I'm not exactly a graphics hog, so it was probably on Low or Medium or whatever - but who cares!?

Added poll for those who are bored to post

Voted yes.

If you are satisfied with medium settings the aforementioned rig should do, but only if you have 2 gigs of RAM. If you dont have the RAM then overclocking the gpu wont help squat.

OTOH it's always nice to be able to raise the detail a bit, and G3 looks sweet at higher settings. Since you only risk an obselete vid-card and will be looking to replace most of your PC within a year or so anyway I'd say go for it...

Zaleukos said:

Voted yes.

If you are satisfied with medium settings the aforementioned rig should do, but only if you have 2 gigs of RAM. If you dont have the RAM then overclocking the gpu wont help squat.

OTOH it's always nice to be able to raise the detail a bit, and G3 looks sweet at higher settings. Since you only risk an obselete vid-card and will be looking to replace most of your PC within a year or so anyway I'd say go for it...

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Yup 2 gigs of RAM,after all you advised me to buy 1 extra some months ago,and I never regretted that decision.
I might as well reformat my HD when the patch is released to squeeze as much power as I can.

@Zakhary
Thanks for the explanation,should I use both RivaTuner and ATITool or one of them?

What drivers should I use?Right now I have 93.71 should I use the latest (182.08) or keep the old ones?

Both. Check out from the latest (beta?) version of RivaTuner documentation which versions of drivers are recommended/supported. Also do some serious googling before doing anything at all.

Looks like the development of ATITool is abandoned the last stable version was released in 2006,do you think it's safe to use with XP-SP3?

Kostaz said:

Looks like the development of ATITool is abandoned the last stable version was released in 2006,do you think it's safe to use with XP-SP3?

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I'm pretty sure ATITool wasn't designed for use with nVidia cards.

JDR13 said:

I'm pretty sure ATITool wasn't designed for use with nVidia cards.

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That's what I thought but look here:

ATITool is an overclocking utility designed for ATI and NVIDIA video cards.

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And among it's features "Full support for all ATI and NVIDIA cards" is mentioned

As i said before.... do the overclocking with rivatuner, atitool is only useful for the stability testing. It doesn't matter at all with atitool what your card is or what the version is and when was it released.