Overclocking the 9600, any additional cooling needed?

[Rataxes]

Hello.

Subject line speaks for itself really. I really quite green at anything but the simplest technical computer tasks, and I've recently bought myself a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128Mb card. This replaced the old GeForce2 card, which I had my more competent cousin attatch a standard cooler fan to. That card I overclocked quite a bit, so I've been hearing about the 9600's great overclocking potential and was just wondering if I would need a cooler for it to reach it's max potential, and if so, how much could I safely overclock it without the help of a cooler, if at all? My system temperature averages 35/95 centigrades/fahrenheit if that's any help.

Oh, and an additional question: With the default settings (HQ Image setting), DirectX 9.0b, and the latest driver, I scored 9800 on 3DMark2001 SE. I had expected it to be a bit higher, seeing as how the score it gets in reviews is often in the 11-12k range, and I'm wondering if my 1.41Ghz AMD Athlon is possibly what is acting as the bottle neck?

[Soulburner]

That card has adequte cooling and is of good quality being a Sapphire.

Many people use different programs, one of the more popular ones is Radclocker.

[Rataxes]

Ok thanks. Tried a bit of overclocking yesterday, and it appears the in-built cooler can get one pretty far. I slowly advanced from 398.3/297 to 506.25/342 and went from 3166 to 3782 in 3DMark03. I've yet to experience any problems or visual glitches besides a few miscolored polygons in the Battle at Proxycon sequence. I read a review in which the reviewer managed to get the core rate up to more than 530 without any additional cooling and no problems, so I'm gonna see if I can maybe push my score up to and above 4000 :)

Tried Radclocker, but I found Rage3DTweak to be able to give me more precise control over the clock rate settings. Do you by the way think 3800 is a reasonable score for the card I have? I'm using an old 1.42Ghz AMD Athlon, 256Mb DDR memory, and a VIA KT333 motherboard.

[Soulburner]

Yup good score for that card. Go into your BIOS and change your AGP Aperture size to 128mb, that was worth about 200 points to me in that benchmark.

[Rataxes]

Checked the aperture size, was already at 128Mb so nothing to gain there :/ Tried going up to 256Mb but didn't notice any difference. I think I've reached a limit of 504/344.25, increasing either rate any more only results in graphical bugs like flickering black dots or corrupted shadows.

think it's odd, considering other people (reviewers that is) have managed to get this very card up to considerably higher rates without any additional cooling. Still, I guess 3800 is something one can settle for.

[Soulburner]

Depends on what cooling it has on it which will vary by card manufacturer, and your case airflow. That and the fact that every card is different.