keat320

For the time being, im just having to live with an OEM 5200 as my video card.... needless to say it is pretty crappy. Now I am wondering if it worth trying to OC it. My case has excellent cooling & airflow, but the card itself only has a HS and no fan.... I do however have a spare AMD Athlon XP OEM heatsink + fan at my disposal. So I have a few questions:

1) Would I see any noticable difference if I OC'ed this card? Is it worth it?
2) Would attaching the AMD heatsink help me OC the card?
3) If 2 is yes, how would I go about attaching it?

Thanks for your help.

aaronrkelly

1) you probably wont notice much difference, theres not alot of headroom on the 5200.....its just to weak. But any improvement would be better than what you had so give it a shot and see what happens, you may just have the mad OCable 5200.

2) yes that would help, anything active (with a fan) will help alot. You could also try attaching a fan to your cards heatsink, get creative. Think zipties..........

3) to attach the AMD sink and fan you would first have to remove the other heatsink. If its thermal epoxied on this could be a chore. I have heard of people putting the card in a plastic bag in the freezer, this loosens the epoxy and it should pop off easily. Then use some thermal epoxy and stick the AMD sink on it. If this is your only graphics card and you cant afford to replace it I suggest you not do this. You could pull the whole gpu off the card when attempting to remove the old heatsink, it happens.

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keat320

So would it be a better idea to just attach one of my spare fans blowing across the current hs? Also, my mobo is out of 3-pin fan connectors.... so how would I go about powering one?

konai_konai666

I've found that the difference between OC and not OC is negligable for this card, when I had one, it seemes so weak that is generally maintains excellent thermal levels with no fan on it whatsoever! PC Gamer just moved the 9800Pro to the Entry Level gaming pc, with the way my 9800 has been on the verge in performance, I think they're right. If theres anything a fan will do for ya, it might increase the life of the card by a few months or something.

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godfoot

You could power it with a 3-pin to molex convertor cable, but the gains you may see are really not at all worth risking overheating the card IMO. I used to have a 5200 in my rig (still have it too, just don't use it anymore unless my current card dies) and I OCed it as far as I could and didn't see any noticable improvement in either benches or real world performance. It was still bottom of the heap.

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keat320

Alright, I think I won't OC it now. Being in high school, I don't really have a lot of dough to through around, and really only can afford significant hardware upgrades every year.... so im holding out for a Nforce 4 system in a few months, but this is all I have for now. I've had it for a year and a half... and it actually performs quite well. I run HL2 w/ everything at max at 1280x1024 and it is as smooth as can be... as a matter of fact I run all games (BFV, etc.) with highest video settings and at 1280x1023 or 1152x864 and they all run fine... however I do have 1.5 gigs of ram, and AA and anisotropic are both off.

nev_payne

I changed the paste on mine form the Leadtek stock paste to AS5 and gained a nice chunk of OC (think its about 30MHz etc)

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