The easiest way to overclock an Ultra is by using the
"Additional GeForce2 Ultra Properties" found in the Display Properties. However,
the first time you go there you will find the overclocking adjustments gray-out.
nVidia only wanted overclockers who knows what they're doing to overclock the
Ultra so they make you do some work to un-gray the overclocking slider.
To make the overclock sliders work, you need to make a
registry entry into the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global.
Make a new folder call NVTweak if it's not already there. Then create a new
DWORD call "CoolBits" and give it a value of 3. Reboot and those overclocking
sliders are yours to use as you see fit. The question is do you want to use it?
After much fooling around I found my Ultra was able to
run stable at 275Mhz core and 500Mhz memory. A good 10% increase over stock. I
think I could get the core a little higher if I were to use an aftermarket
cooler like the Blue Orb.
Overclock Benchmarks: Custom Settings
As you can see in the above comparison, overclocking the
Ultra didn't improved the performance by all that much. I don't know about you
but I don't think going from 63 FPS to 70 FPS is worth the possibility of
killing a $500 video card. I won't bother showing the Normal and High Quality
benchmarks because overclocking had no effects on the scores. At those low
setting, the Annihilator 2 Ultra is waiting for the CPU to catch up.
Next page: Conclusion
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