Absurd Minds

RivaTuner is one of those programs that a computer enthusiast should always have on their computer. Not only does it help you turn up the fan speed on your video card to help keep it cooler, but it also helps you overclock it. Overclocking can give you an extra boost in frames per second in your games by turning up the core clock, memory clock, and shader clock on your graphics card. The downside with overclocking is that if done too high, you can permanently damage or even kill your graphics card (so it's not always recommended to do.) Also, RivaTuner shows you the temperature, as well as many other aspects of your graphics card, in a graph format. In RivaTuner, to make your fan speed faster, do the following:

- Find where it says "Target adapter" and within that box, you'll find your video card's name. Right under your video card's name, you'll find a small box in the corner that says "Customize." Click that and click on the icon that looks like video card (it's the 1st one with the green motherboard looking icon."

- Make sure you check the "Enable low-level fan control" checkbox and click on the "Fixed" radio button. That gives you the choice to manually set a percentage in speed by moving the slider left and right. For the best result, slide it to around 60% to 70%. Any higher and you might start hearing the fan from your video card (not a danger).

- Once you find the speed you want, hit "apply" at the bottom and it'll set the fan speed to that of choice. You can have Rivatuner always start with that fan speed with each reboot by checking the "Apply fan settings at Windows startup" and clicking Save. You can make many Fan profile settings by clicking the black floppy disk icon. It will then tell you to give your profile a name for you to recognize it.

So there are the steps in increasing your video card's fan speed. I will not cover overclocking with Rivatuner due to the facts listed above. I also hold no responsibility in the event that you DO overclock and accidentally kill or damage your graphics card.

Is that only for nVidia cards or am I remembering it completely wrong?

I might have to mess with that sometime, I want to get a eyefinity video card sometime in the future, and I am gonna get some beefy fans for my comp, so I want to try to overclock it some, not much because it scares me, but some just cause.

These are the steps I go through to get to my video card's settings (Nvidia card.) I'm pretty sure these are general steps regardless of manufacturer.