The State of Linux NVIDIA Overclocking

As most of you are aware, due to poor ATI proprietary Linux drivers, ATI graphics cards are usually left out of the game when it comes to graphics card performance under Linux. Then of course, there's NVIDIA. NVIDIA has been developing Linux unified drivers for quite a while (the first Linux release with Pixel and Vertex Shader support occurred in early 2001) and it has definitely reflected upon their Linux graphics performance. Of course, both ATI and NVIDIA have extremely reliable drivers for Microsoft Windows, otherwise neither would exist. One stake neither NVIDIA nor ATI currently have a definite claim to is graphics card overclocking under Linux. There are numerous Windows overclocking utilities such as CoolBits, NVTweak, RivaTuner, ATiTool, and PowerStrip. One of the few ways to overclock your NVIDIA graphics card under Linux (without editing the video BIOS or physical card modification) is through NVClock. This is a handy little utility from the good people over at LinuxHardware.org, used for overclocking your NVIDIA based graphics card. In this article, we will explore NVIDIA overclocking as we try NVClock on a couple different of our NVIDIA based systems. The systems making their rounds today contain a Prolink PixelView AGP 5900XT, Gigabyte PCI Express 6600GT (GV-NX66T128), Leadtek WinFast PCI Express 6600GT TDH, and finally an old but beloved Riva TNT2 AGP. This article isn't intended to teach novices the fundamentals of overclocking a graphics card or all of the aspects of properly overclocking it (proper cooling, checking for artifacts, etc...), but is designed to inform Linux users of the options, or there the lack-there-of, for overclocking their NVIDIA graphics cards and the successes/failures we experienced when overclocking a few of our cards under Linux.