[gammacrush2000]

I heard you could overclock your video card to near 9700 performance. I would like ot know which card can do it and which manufacturer is the best?

i keep on hearing a fuss that ati uses a new pcb now. What the heck does that mean in the oc world?

[Martin]

The Radeon 9600 Pro has better overclockability level than the 9500 series due to its reduced die size (which also means lower power consumption).

With tools such as Riva Tuner, you can "softmod" the card to become the higher level cards.

To explain this, the Radeon 9500 (NP) and 9600/9600 Pro have only 4 rendering pipelines (as opposed to 8 on the 9500P/9700/9800 series); doing the softmod will supposedly unlock the 4 "hidden" pipelines to achieve the performance of the 9700.

The softmod trick will only work on the 128 MB 9500NP and up.

[gammacrush2000]

so i should get a 9600pro to oc it to near 9700 performance?

and is there a big risk factor of ------ing it up?