The question has always come up. “Should I overclock my video card?”.
We all want to know we are resourceful and frugal enough to make a good deal out of what we have. It’s in our nature.
Contrary to popular opinion.
Overclocking shows no actual performance difference.
It may show increase in certain feilds of benchmarking but will also show a hit in other fields. If the card makers made it so you could unlock magical sections of your gadget so you can save money, no one would buy better. The best you can get from overclocking is a cool score on a benchmark test.
Your video card is fine for what it is made for. I have seen some extreme benchmark scores come from that video card. Truth is though, once you put any weight on it like actually gaming and random processes such as gaming, you will see a drastic hit on it.
I have busted many video cards and processors and sticks of memory through the years (12 years) playing the cheap role.
For better performance buy a video card that performs better right out of the box. and then go back to your 9400 and overcliock the dogsquirts out of it and see what it’s full potential is. get benchmarks and play some games. Then toss it aside and put the newer better card in and see for yourself.
If you overclocked good enough the 9400 would have out performed a boxed 9600 right out of the pack. Low shader count means your video card will stop at the low number and not stress on drawing the greater shaders. In fact it will ignore them. So your benchmark scores could smear the 9500 9600 9200 210 video cards. but in actual game play. That’s a whole different story.
Just because a video card does not have certain features does not mean it will not perform as good. it just means it will look like crap and not have all of the image features. In some cases it will perform 1000 times better and faster when clocked like crazy, but you will not see what everyone sees in the game.
heck it was almost 3 years before I realized gtaiii billboards actually had crap on them. and that there was smoke coming out of the stacks at teh first safe house.
You do not want the video card with the first of a feature. you want the video card that came years later. The 9500 and the 9600 have huge shader counts yes, but they don’t have the nuts to use them.
move into the 200s or greater (which is the same processor as the 9000s) .. the freaking 500s are right around the corner.
Yank that card and stick it in a media computer. It’s great for dvd and 720p hd.