+s gforce 5200fx lol Easy route: Video Card Comparison - GPUReview.com but you probably have an AGP motherboard so meh.. A good way to boost performance is to first understand your operating system, how it works and uses its resources. A well-functioning os is key. also, Upgrading/tweaking your CPU, and your ram, can show a significant performance boost in graphical rendering. Then your drivers and how compatible they are with the programs you use, and what functions effect what. Then understand your card: Ie; try using GPU-Z (GPU-Z Video card GPU Information Utility ) to find the fillrate and other such aspects of your card.. A card that age is going to be limited by three things: 1. Opengl, it may not support some glsl functions 2. The core/memory speed - how fast data can be transferred, although the AGP/PCI bus limits that to about 400mhz. 3. fillrate/texfillrate = how fast your card can render raw scenes, not even counting any spiffy shadow effects or lighting or such. My laptop 7150m GO has a fillrate of .6-.8 gpixels, while its able to run stuff at low resolution, the poor fillrate eventually catches up to it. Also some cards have weaknesses, again comparing to this laptop card, it functions quite well, I can play oblivion and bioshock and such at decent framerates.. but the weakness is in lighting, shader effects and shadowing.. Enabling any form of shadows dramatically eats the fps of this onboard like cake.. normalmapping and parralax mapping make a substantial hit.. Complex lighting and HDR make baby raptorjesus cry.. and occasionally opengl fullscreen shaders have some issues as well. You can test your card's strengths and weaknesses (in direct3d at least) using a basic utility called D3D RightMark ( Latest News. D3D Rightmark ) Run a few of the tests, and it'll help you understand any bottlenecks that may exist. The final way is overclocking, but I don't know if that'd be good with the 5200FX. You'd have better luck just moving up to a cheap pci-e mobo/card
Overclocking would be the best way to go. I recently overclocked my little TNT2 M64 for fun and got 300 points (from 800) in 3DMark01. Awesome lol You'll have to dl Coolbits and apply the registry settings to unclock the overclocking in the Nvidia Control Panel http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=815 Once that's done, start cranking the Mhz of the Core and Memory slowly and individually. For example, bump the Core 5 Mhz up and then run a benchmark with 3DMark01 or any other 3DMark. Look for some artifacts, record your score. Repeat until you get artifacts or your score decreases drastically. Also check your temperatures!
When your overclocking be sure to pay attention not only to your GPU temp but also your ambient temps. I use rivatuner and EVGA's streamlined version of it to monitor these. Ambient temperature will indicate changes in memory and support component temps. These are just as important as the GPU temp !!
I overclocked my gforce 7150M go from 425 to 525, and its slightly unstable.. occasionally.. but most of the time its stable and the max temp it hits is only 2 deg centigrade more the nice thing is that my fillrate went up from .8gpixels to 1.1gpixels, and I gained 800 points on 3dmark 01 .
Oh, it's not that dangerous if you overclock it step by step. It can definitely help boost the performance of laptop GPUs which are pretty much underpowered. However, you should only do it while you are hooked up to the main power. Running the GPU overclocked will drain your battery real quick.
I wonder if you can overvolt the laptop GPU for even more fun I once tried overclocking the ATI IGP in my old Dell laptop. I ended corrupting my OS and then it won't boot into Windows anymore lol Even safe more was no longer safe heheh.
You can, but only on certain bios and such.. I have a Phoenix bios, I'm not even sure I can even re-install vista without a recovery partition, let alone over-volt anything.
