Maximize the potential of your graphics card:

If you are like me, you'll never be 'completely' satisfied with the performance of your latest and the state-of-the-art 3D graphics card. Well, when I say 'never', I do not mean to incline that these latest 3D cards on the market are poor in what they have to offer. With all the new technology in 3D acceleration incorporated, these cards are just awesome. The human nature is such that, the better they get the MORE we expect and want from them. Since some manufacturers these days include such lovely overclocking utilities we are tempted even more to reach for that little bit extra. So what should you be doing to make sure that you're getting the best performance out of your graphics card?

Overclocking is something most of us have got accustomed to these days. Well, firstly you should remember that overclocking carries risks. The warranty on your product is rendered void if you exceed the manufacturer's settings. Also, exceeding manufacturer settings could potentially damage it permanently. Even if your feeling bold enough to take these risks I have some other courses of action you could take.

The first and foremost step is driver updates. The current trend of rushing new products into the market means that early drivers are often flawed, which inevitably leads to updates and patching. Also companies like Creative, Elsa & Guillemot work from reference drivers supplied by the chipset manufacturer. These reference drivers are usually one step behind from the latest release. So go ahead and download the latest reference drivers the manufacturer of the chip set has to offer. In most instances these will work with your card, and deliver a more stable & higher performance platform. If the board you have, has any specific features such as video capture etc.. then the chances are that they wont work with the reference drivers, and nor do you receive any tech-support. So make sure you look into this before updating the drivers.

The AGP Aperture setting in your BIOS is another area where it helps to increase performance. This represents the maximum amount of system RAM available for your AGP graphics card. Ideally this should be set to at least 64MB. If your system has 128MB or more, you'll find that there is a marginal increase in performance by increasing the aperture size.

Make sure you have installed support for new features like bump-mapping and geometry acceleration. Also install DirectX 7.0a. Defragment your hard drive to rearrange files and unused space on your hard disk, so that games and applications that uses swap files does not hinder performance too much. Once you've done all this if you are still not satisfied then you could opt for over clocking......