when actually installing the card don't forget to do common stuff (see below) like grounding yourself (touch something metal thats grounded - such as the case chasis), don't force it (use adequete force, but if the card starts torquing you are pushing too hard, and need to exame whats in the way)

IF it comes with a manual - READ IT (hopefully it has nice little pictures to follow of installing the card)

some things to keep in mind while installing:
1) never ever ever put something in the slot right next to the card (2 slot space is a good idea if you can spare the PCI slots)
2) try to maintain touching the case to continually ground yourself
3) carpet == bad
4) sock feet == bad
5) gentle force only!
6) don't forget to plug it in (i think it requires a molex connector, the card should have one somewhere near one of the sides - look for a spare one from your PSU)
7) if problems you don't expect, STOP and ASK FOR HELP (hey, $150 would be a shame to lose to a n00b mistake )
screw down the bracket!
9) you might need to "unlock" the AGP slot first - its that tab on the end of the brown slot

I'm happy to note that I also purchased a one year "no questions asked" warranty for it. Apparently, I can return it or have it repaired and they will pay for it "no questions asked." Hopefully this will cover any n00b mistakes I may make

"Yeah, I decided to solder wires to random points around the board. Can I have a new one please?"

it won't cover n00b mistakes me thinks

and doing ANY modifications (be it overclocking, or "soldering random wires on") voids ALL warantee's, and if you RMA it after doing that you are considered an a-hole and should be shot

What's wrong with overclocking?!

When you screw up and blame others for your own faults

nothing, i have my CPU, northbridge, and GPU overclocked right now...

Do you really get that much of a benefit from OCing your GPU?

Sometimes there's a noticeable benefit; other times it's just to show off; like when I oc'd my calc to 15 MHz

I've done that. You can only get it to about 20MHz before instability kicks in :/

fun, what can Silver be taken to before it gets unstable?

Not a whole lot more; it's already overclocked by TI.

ok, didn't relize that. I thought that they were diffrent chips.

Nope, same z80 chip, just at different core speeds.

what I meant by diffrent chips is like the diffrent between an Atolon XP @ 1.2 ghz and one at 1.4

those are the same chip too

thats the reason "slower" chips overclock "more" - often they are the exact same as their faster siblings, only badged/clocked slower because there is a demand for the slower, cheaper chips. SOMETIMES they are "crippled" chips that were unstable at the required speed for the highend, but are more than adequate for the lowend (thats what celerons are, pentiums with partially bad caches )

@Kerm:

OC'ing a GPU can get anywhere from 3-10 FPS increase - not a whole lot, but it can help level out the drops in framerates during heavy/busy frames, such as large firefights in an FPS

They can also be the same chip with the same specs but less or omitted L2 cache, as in the case of one of the Athlon series.

quick question,

I got my hands on a second monitor, so I dug out my old nVidia TNT2 AGP video card to use the monitor. The other card is an nVidia GeForce MX 4000 PCI (not PCI-E). I set the BIOS and Windows to mage the MX 4000 the primary monitor/card. I found drivers for the TNT2, installed and restarted, but now Blockland will not play. The drivers had OpenGL 1.5. I had the MX 4000 drivers installed before I did this. Can I get some help?

I tried to help him with this, and we got the menus to show up, but no 3dized content. Ideas?

it is still made using the same process, and has the "missing" cache on the chip. But as i mentioned, part of the cache might be malfunctioning, hence turned off at the fab and turned into something like the Celeron.