No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technology the ever so popular games use. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward for a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the times the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

Increasing the memory clock too much, produces the so-called "artifacts".

The stock clock speeds for the core and memory were 325MHz and 195MHz respectively as you can see in the ATiTool screenshot below. Note that the low quality memory modules from Elixir prevent us from setting the memory clock much higher.

First thing we do to overclock the card is to step-by-step increase the memory clock until we find the maximum stable setting that does not produce screen artifacts in either ATiTool test or the games. Then, being certain of that frequency, we increase the core clock likewise. Our final settings can be seen in the following screenshot.

The overclocking frequencies for the X300SE.

As you see, the core could be overclocked by another 85MHz. Normally, we'd be excited as 85MHz is quite high, but given the fact the Powercolor X300 could clock up to 500MHz, we can only assume that further overclocking with this card was not possible due to the fanless heatsink.

The Elixir memories were the other factor that let us down in our overclocking effort. The memory clock could only be set to 230MHz without errors. Of course, we shouldn't expect more from such memory modules, otherwise they wouldn't call them 5T would they?

Anyhow, let's see the performance boost we got with the new clock settings:

As you can see, the overclocked Connect3D X300SE offers around 22% higher performance than the stock clocked X300SE. Given that, if you overclock the card to these settings, the X300SE can now seriously compete with the 6200TC and X300. However, you can also overclock these cards as well and then, we're back to playing catch up once again.