Need more speed? Try out Coolbits (Nvidia cards)

Do you have an older laptop with an Nvidia based GPU in it? Is it showing its age with the latest 3d games? Or maybe you just want more performance from your brand new laptop. This article should help all Nvidia based GPU owners get more performance from their laptop.

What is Coolbits? Nvidia drivers come with a very nice overclocking program hidden inside, called, of course Coolbits. It is capable of offering you a 25% increase over stock speeds on both your gpu clock and memory, as well as OpenGL, Direct3D, and 3D Antialiasing settings. It is a very nice utility that came straight from Nvidia.

Before we go any further, make sure you back up all of your files and remember that--along with most anything else--you do this at your own risk. If your house burns to the ground, or your dog becomes infested with demons because you followed these instructions then no one at www.notebookreview.com is liable. [ ]

Lets get started.

The first thing you need to do is unlock the program so you can use it. This requires you to change your system registry, SO PLEASE BACK UP ANY DATA BEFORE CHANGING ANYTHING IN THE REGISTRY. Now, to get to your registry, left-click on your Start button, then left click on Run. When the command box opens, type "regedit" (without the quotes) in the command line, and press OK. Your registry will open.

The Key that you need to modify is located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARENVIDIA CorporationGlobalNVTweak. You can navigate to that folder by clikcing the + signs next to each Key to expand the tree. Once you get there, right-click inside the right pane, and choose New>DWORD value.

Name the value "Coolbits" (witout the quotes). Right click on Coolbits, and choose Modify. Change the Value data to "3", and click OK. Reboot, and there will magically be a tab in the advanced settings of your GPU for "Clock Frequencies".

The first thing you need to to do is tick the "Allow clock frequency adjustments" box and click "Apply".

In simple terms, you slide the slider to the speed you're hoping for and click the "Test New Settings" button. It's normal for the screen to flicker or go blank, show a progress indicator, then flicker again. If nothing horrible happens during the test (bluescreen, spontaneous reboot, video corruption etc) you can click "Apply" and test with 3DMark or any other graphically intensive application (like a game silly [ ]). The drivers require you to test the settings before you can apply them. Whatever you do, DON"T click the "Apply these settings at startup" button until you're absolutely sure that your card is stable at those speeds.

Tips:

Don't just drag the sliders over to some crazily-high number and hope for the best. Take it gradually, a few MHz at a time. Easy does it. As my good friend once said, its not the size of the wave, its the motion of the ocean. . .or maybe he was talking about something else, it just seemed fitting right there.

Use benchmarks and your favorite games to see if there's really a noticeable improvement. There *should* be but if there isn't, no sense in overclocking for that particular application.

Signs you've just gone too far: (don't worry, it doesn't ruin your card)

White-spotted "snow" in games

Mouse cursor disappears, becomes a "box of static" or leaves trails (In my experience, the "box of static" is most common)

Textures (walls etc) flash, scroll, are the wrong colors or look distorted in games

Other odd graphical behaviour in windows or games

Whew, that was long. Have fun. Until next time. . .


Sony GRT270-16.1" UXGA; P4 2.8GHz; 1GB RAM; 80GB HD; DVD+-RW; 64MB Geforce 5600; XP Pro

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