Overclock 8600m GT or not?

I'm not a huge gamer but I do play WoW and Medieval II: Total War. Right now, I am just using the Dell drivers on my 8600m GT. With the games I play, will i benefit alot by goin to drivers from laptopvideo2go and overclocking? Or our these games not demanding enuff to max out my card. Also, what video settings are you using in WoW (for those who play it), Thanks!

PS. My screen is a WXGA+ and I have the t7500 CPU with 2gbs RAM

 

lol, why not to overclock?

i mean, thats a weird question. have you tried or searched before posting? if you are -not- happy with your performance on whatever games you want, try updating drivers and then overclocking. if that doesnt help and everything else is ok with ur pc, you might need a better card. if you are happy with your performance, i dont see a point on asking that..

 

No matter how careful you are there is some risk of damaging the card, and over the long term it can decrease the lifespan of your card.

 

Exactly. I'm just asking if there is any need to do so with those games. I mean, will this card play those games maxed out with just dell drivers or should I OC for squeezing out some more FPS's. Get what I mean?

 

You didn't mention how much and what kind of memory you have on your 8600GT, but i guess it's safe to say your video card is more then over-qualified to play the games you do. Keeping your video card drivers up to date with the drivers from laptopvideotogo is a good idea though. I've got my Vaio 5 moth's ago, and since then my 3DMark06 (a program that tests the graphic power of your computer)score went up almost 30% just by updating my the drivers once every month or so. Over clocking your card is not really needed for you so i see no reason why you would. It also will cause your notebook to produce more heat and reduces battery life besides the risk of ruining it because of inexperience. It is an interesting subject to read more about if you're interested in it though, so reading and learning more about overclocking is a good idea. In that case by the time your video card becomes to old and slow to do it's job you can always reconsider OC it, and know what you're doing to

 

The 8600M GT I have is the 256 meg version. The drivers I am using are the nvidia 7.15.11.5655 ones that were released on 8/23/2007. I did try the 167.26 drivers from laptopvideo2go but in doin so, I'd get the BSOD after waking up from hibernate so I rolled them back. Any suggestions on a better, stable version?

 

You should be fine. I used to play WoW on my old laptop on max settings with an X600, 1 GB RAM, and 2.8 pentium 4.

 

First run it and then decide whether or not you need more performance. For WOW you don’t need to OC.

 

The most stable version at the moment are the 156.69 drivers. They we're also recommended for Vista and included in a Windows update, hibernation and sleep function should be no problem with those.

 

Even if you don't overclock, you can get better performance if you update your video drivers. I have found that 169.01 from Laptopvideo2go.com increased my benchmarks about 5% over the original Dell drivers.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=147214&page=2
I overclocked to get my laptop ready for crysis and btw I have 3 years in house dell warranty I can always reset the clocks and If it does diminish overtime(which I HIGHLY doubt) dell would replace it in no time

I bot WoW with max settings leave it almost on for 20 hours straight. The temp doesnt go higher than 56 C.