Help a new guy to overclocking

[wWooDd]

Im slowly getting into overclocking with the coming onslaught of graphic intensive games. Im looking to get the most I can out of my 9800pro. I bought it a couple years ago, but I believe it was a Saphire with heatsinks on the chips & gpu, nothing extensive but there none the less. Further more I have a couple 80mm case fans over the pci/agp area. The problem area for me is not the overclock its self but what is actually safe or how I can tell Im not damaging the card. I always assumed that temperature plays a key role in this, but Im not even sure if my card supports temp monitoring, or even how to check. I know artifacts would mean too high but then again Ive gotten artifacts in games such as Doom 3 by simply upping the AA or AF some times.

Any help is appreciated. Any info you need I will try to respond as soon as I can, thanks a lot.

 

[videoclone]

I had my 9800Pro overclocked to 400Mhz Core and 700Mhz ram from Default 380/680 and i also had artefact in Doom3 .. all other games were fine though ... i heard you can push the core higher and same with ram. but i wanted my card not to die at the time... thats always a risk after a while the card will die ... as overclocking is stressing the thing past its capabilities.


Google one of these to download and do some overclocking.

Radlinker <-- Adds overclocking panel in ATI Control panel
ATI Tool < -- overclocking program
PowerStrip <-- Another overclocking Program

 

[dug777]

afaik ati tool and ati tray tools will find your highest stable core/mem for you...