Hi guys and girls,

There is lot of information about overclocking video cards. But my recent tendence is thinking about "downclocking", that is, making the 3d graphics card run at a lower than default clock speed. Why? I'm not sure but would this be advantadges of doing such thing:?

1.- More stability (including less game freezes etc..)
2.- Adding life-time to the hardware
3.- Less temperature on the hardware, so affecting the whole computer temperature

Of course, as I'm not a hardware expert maybe these reasons are partially wrong, or completelly wrong, and thats why I'm posting it here. SO....

What do you think?

My stupid creative Banshee PCI freezes randomly, and i DID NOT OVERCLOCK at all, but it freezes sometimes. Dunno if downclocking it would make freezes disappear..

I have the latest bios on my banshee (creative)
I'm not overclocking ANYTHING, mobo, CPU etc..
I'm using default PCI settings on bios
I'm using latest creative drivers
WIN98se
Freezes on direct3D and openGL, and glide, anything that uses hardware, and apparently randomly

I tried downclocking my banshee to 95mhz, and it freezed as always after 1-2 hours playing homeworld online. But this time it has been worse as the motherboard made the pc speaker to beep continuosly and i became scared  
I reverted settings back to 100mhz, as i prefer regular way of freezing  

So, patience, if i get it right, using the banshee on fast systems is problematic, im using a p3 866mhz, and i guess it makes the banshee to run at full potential, maybe beyond expected performance, due to cpu and mobo beeing much more modern than the banshee itself. wrong? it sucks..!

Hope all this problems vapourise when i finally get my v5 5500..

There should be no reason to downclock for these reasons.

If a producer and manufacturer did not think the card would be stable or stand the test of time, they would not have released it at the clock speeds they did. 

My advice would be to stick with the factory clock speed standards, rather than go slower.  You will probably cause more damage underclocking than using standard factory speeds.

Just whack some cooling ducts in there, if temperature is what you are worried about.  Apart from that, you should be fine.