Almost forgot to add this, that would have been a mistake... If you screw your system, in part or in whole, trying to do what I have done in the contents of this article it is YOUR FAULT! Not Mine, I won't be held responsible for it.  If you use this as a guide, proceed to do the following at your own risk. You have been warned...

My First O/C Experience...

Not many articles today are published based on older systems.  The problem with this is that most of us are using "older" systems.  We cannot relate to the latest and greatest hardware benchmarks.  They blow our systems away.  Enough of that, let's get to the point of this article...

About a week ago I emailed Se7en over at ipKonfig asking for advice on video card cooling.  He recommended the Blue Orb.  I went over the Nerdsbyte and picked one up for ~$11.  A few days later it arrived, and I undertook my first journey into over-clocking.

Two days before I had tested my card with tntclk, a program for o/c the TNT2 series of graphics cards.  I got the card up to 135/200 and that's it, anything more and the system started freezing up.  I probably could have taken the memory higher at this point, but I decided against it. 

Taking off the factory Heatsink:

I now have my Blorb sitting in front of me, my TNT2 out of my case, and am wondering how in the heck do I get the old HeatSink off...  I read over quite a few articles on doing this, and after the HS not popping off after prying and twisting it I decided to take a little something from each article I've read.  Taking a hint from several of the articles I read, I stuck the card in a static bag, then placed it in the freezer for 30 minutes.  Then looking at the Virtual Hideout article, I positioned a PCI slot cover on the memory and pried it off with knife.(See pic below as a reference)  The picture below is from the Virtual Hideout's Blorb review.  

To be quite frank with you, it almost scared me to death, the loud POP! made me think I had really screwed up big time.  This card was my pride and joy, and I thought it was dead.  Come to find out it wasn't.  After I had recovered from shock, I proceeded to wipe off the loose particles of glue with Q-Tip and some alcohol.  Once I removed this, I started scraping away with a utility knife razor blade that I got from Wal-Mart.  After I had all the glue off, I wiped over the chip once again with some alcohol, and then wiped off the bottom of my Blorb where it would be making contact with the chip.

Mounting the Blorb:

I also asked Se7en how to do this because I did not want to use the frag tape included with the Blorb.  He told me to use a small amount superglue along with the thermal paste supplied by Thermal Take.  I went ahead and put the thermal paste on the chip like so...

The white obviously represents the paste, and the black area is where I put the superglue.  I applied a small amount of superglue to both the chip and the Blorb, because when I applied it only to the chip the Blorb came off.  When this happened I had to start all over with the alcohol and scraping.  Its a good thing Thermal Take was fairly generous with the amount of paste because while I was doing my card the first time I let my roommate put some of it on both his K6-2 550, and his VooDoo3 3000.  I let the Blorb set on the card for about 2 hours before I decided to put it back in the case.  This may have been a lil overboard, but I didn't want the thing falling off.  After the two hours were up I stuck it back in the computer, and started hoping I hadn't broke the card.  The card showed up on startup, and Windows loaded.  The sweet taste of victory was mine. 

Now for some Benchmarks:

The V770 came in the box at 125/150.  With the factory heatsink I was able to attain 135/200 stable.  Now with the Blorb I can run my TNT2 stabily at 170/225!  To test the stability of the card at the specified speeds I ran it through each demo 3 times in succession, and played about an hour and a half of Q3A online with the same graphics settings as used in the demos.

As you can easily see my card runs very well when o/ced.  I rather enjoy the extra 11-12 fps :)  It took my gaming in high quality from choppy to playable.  For $11 I would recommend the Blorb to anyone wanting to cool their graphics card down.  If you have any questions or comments you can send them to me here.  Now on to o/c the PII 350!

Until Next Time....