Overclocking Advice please (9800 pro)

Big Chief

Im looking for the advice from someone who has good overclocking experience.

I currently have a 9800 radeon pro with zalman heatpipe cooling with fan ( http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/ZM80C-HP.htm )

Im thinking since im using all this to get low temps i might as well look into overclocking it a fair bit (if that is possible?) I've heard about being able to flash cards and overclock etc..

I used rage3d tweak to get the clock speeds up a bit ( think i managed about 40/50 or so mhz on the memory and core speeds before it came unstable/little glitches ) but im sure ive heard a good few people say here that they were able to get the cards alot higher (even upto XT speeds with proper cooling)

My board is the abit AN7 and you can change the AGP voltages etc (ive heard this being mentioned when overclocking before aswell).. Just incase thats of any help when explaining

Basically in some d3d games im not getting the performance i would like with my system and with the cooling methods i have in place i would like to look about getting more performance for my card (cpu wise i wouldnt overclock as i have a 'silent' system and the cpu runs at about 50degrees now after i got a new heatsink as my other one was to loud)

I got vietcong to play and in the first mission i noticed running round the camp that my fps would at time go down to below 30 (which is unacceptable at any rate) and this wouldnt change no matter what res or settings i put it to (weird? i noticed a 5fps increase if i changed character detail/graphic detail to the lowest setting) but this didnt change no matter what kinda res i set it to (or even if i changed around the ATi D3D settings which i did for ages no end) thats another problem incase anyone has heard of this...

So would it be possible to overclock my card a good bit with my cooling techniques and how would you go about it?

system specs are -

XP3000+ barton
1gb twinmos dual PC3200 ddr ram
Radeon 9800 Pro
Abit AN7 mainboard

Is there any more info i need to give? just let me know...

Big Chief

also -

AGP Aperture size, what does this do/mean?

(sorry for daft question but always wanted to find this out..)

would it give a performance increase if put up?

quarryman

actually i had been wondering about aperture size myself the other day. found this

Generally measured in megabytes (MB), AAS is the amount of system memory (RAM) shared with an AGP graphics card in order for it to have more memory to process textures and other visual data.

there's a good guide here

1. Never set the AAS below 16 MB

2. Always set AAS to either be less than or equal to your total system memory

i put mine at 256 the other day so i'll try change it a bit and see what effect it has on my 3dmark score.

Co33iE

I had some problems a couple of weeks ago when all of a sudden my fps would drop to 30 in all games. turned out i just needed to defrag my hard disks.

give it ago ya never know.

Creamy Goodness

Originally posted by Big Chief
also -
AGP Aperture size, what does this do/mean?

it works like a page file for your graphics card.

set it to either 64/128mb for radeon 9800pro