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ok, now im new to o/cing and it seems like i could mess stuff up if im not careful. im going to overclock my geforce4 mx420. i installed the program called coolbits.reg, and im ready to adjust the clock frequencies. how good should my cooling system be? would it be fine if i just took off the side of my tower? thanks!
I find taking the side off of the tower and sticking a 12 inch deskfan in front of it can drop the temperatures by at least 10 C :D In fact, I have to do that anyway, because the fan on my video card has jammed, so that's the only cooling my video card gets now - has the added benefit of cooling the rest of the computer at the same time :p
How much you can overclock is another question - I've got a Geforce2, and have that overclocked by 5% by default when I boot the computer up. I've taken it up to 10% before too and had no problems, bu I've started noticing slight glitches in the graphics in 3D-intensive games when taking it any higher than that. Geforce 4 might be different though, because it's already at a higher clock frequency to begin with :)
Truth is, you're not going to get a significant performance increase out of overclocking a GeForce 4 mx 420. I have one, there's really not much you can push it to doing.
If you absolutely must, make sure you have adequate cooling, like a heatsink/fan combo, or if you're poor like me a desk fan on an open box can do the trick too. Like I said though, there's not a fantastic increase in performance, the change would be so little.
And if you're serious man...the new Geforce FX's come out in February, we're talking some serious muscle. I heard that within a few generations of video cards they'll be able to render things like Final Fantasy:TSW in real time instead of prerendering them. That should be badass.
Hey, there's also lots of tools on the web that let you overclock your GPU nowadays. Usually has a little slider bar that lets you set the MHz. Just don't push it way too far, because it'll freeze up your card, and might do damage. Although most cards like that have fail-safes to keep them from burning up.