Vista - 8400GS overclock

Is it a good idea to overclock this card and is there any good performance increases?

Also what is a good program to test the stability of the overclock.

With 8 series cards, overclocking usually improves things. Use GPU-Z to monitor temperatures and RivaTuner to increase MHz.

The best approach is to increase the memory or core clock by 5 MHz, then run a game for a short period and look for visual artifacts. Do this while logging temperatures with GPU-Z. As the MHz increase becomes extreme run prolonged graphically intensive temperature and artifact tests.

Depending on situation a 30% overclock is indeed possible.

The 8400gs is not a gaming card, and should probably not be overclocked. It's a budget card that it more geared towards multimedia than gaming.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend overclocking anything lower than a x800gt series(8800GT, 9800GT, etc)

Even if you do overclock that card, it woun't be much and you won't see a notciable difference, especially with the rest of your system.

Using the apps Macavity suggested, you could give it a go. But as CH mentioned, you're unlikely to notice any real improvement.

Just to make it three comments on the negative side ..............dont bother , the only real improvement you see overclocking gpu's is when you ramp up the memory alongside the core , if you try and oc the memory on that card it'll meet a very untimely end , or at the very least get very very hot and artifact all over the place , sorry

Well I'll back down then... and go up my 8600's memory clock another few megahertz .

I had this card earlier this year (ASUS) was a pretty okay card,I overclocked it on stock and went pretty far.I could play Crysis on Medium-High settings.Hope this helps.

i was just about to say this.......

GPU OC's are flaky at best, unless you can pull a pretty high (stable) OC its a pointless exercise...

GPU's run VERY hot by default, & a few mhz over stock will send a lesser cards temps through the roof (& im not saying your cards crap, its just not ''high end'' & has cooling relative to that.)

if you are able to pull a pretty decent OC, b/c its lacking ''SP's'' your only likely to gain 1-2fps increases...

IMHO.....buy a newer card, even a jump to an 8800GT will be ''night & day'' difference from the 8400GS (they're dirt cheap now)

I am considering overclocking my 8400M GS card.

Right now its temperature is a rather pedestrian 53 decrees Celcius. I have heard that anything below 60 is absolutely fine and safe for the card.

At any rate, the latest NVIDIA-authored forceware for cards operating on 64-bit Vista or 64-bit Windows 7 operating systems is here.

32-bitters find NVIDIA forceware here.

Both are supposed to work fine with DirectX 9 and 10.

And of course:

Learn how to uninstall your old drivers and prepare your system for integrating forceware properly here.

I'm going to take it slow and post back on results. I don't play any games except for GTA San Andreas. :/

This will be my very first time overclocking anything.

Is that your idle or load temps?

It's the load temps you have to worry about.

Good luck