NVClock v0.8 BETA Preview

Several months ago, we published an article entitled The State of Linux NVIDIA Overclocking, which received quite a bit of attention, as it revealed overclocking potential on some GeForce cards, but also showed problems with other recent graphics cards. Of course, the sole way to overclock the NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux at the time without using a video BIOS editor was NVClock. A few months later, accompanying the 1.0-7664 NVIDIA display drivers, finally came the introduction of CoolBits to the Linux platform. Since this time, there hasn't been much in the way of Linux NVIDIA overclocking advancements, until today. Earlier this morning, after two years in the dark, there’s finally a major update to NVClock, and that is the 0.8 BETA. Today we have a short preview from this latest overclocking extravaganza.

Features:

· GeforceFX/6/7 support (experimental overclocking: Coolbits + low-level)
· Pipeline modding for NV4x cards
· Smartdimmer support for 6200Go based laptops
· Hardware monitoring for LM99/MAX6659/F75375S/W83L785R chipsets
· Support for internal NV43/NV44/NV47 temperature sensor
· Ability to enable disabled temperature sensors used on NV43/NV44/NV47 boards
· Fanspeed adjustment for FX5900/6600GT/6800GT boards and F75375S/W83L785R sensors
· OpenGL options using NV-CONTROL extension
· Rewritten GTK2 interface
· Bios parsing (GeforceFX/6/7)
· X86-64 support
· Windows support for debugging purposes

As we only received the NVClock 0.8 BETA source-code moments ago, we were limited to testing the graphics card with a NVIDIA 7800GTX, 6600GT, and 5900XT. All of the boxes we used for testing contained a wide variety of different hardware components and software versions. Due to time constraints, we limited the NVClock testing to Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) 5.10 Colony 3 and FedoraCore4 with the 2.6.12 kernel. Also, as this BETA now supports x86_64, we couldn't help but to also test for 64-bit compatibility. In all of our software testing we did in this short amount of time, we found absolutely no software related conflicts nor did NVClock have troubles detecting the cards in the GeForce 5, 6, and 7 series. The NVIDIA drivers used were both the latest 1.0-7676 release and the previous 1.0-7667 Linux drivers.