Prior to NVIDIA porting
CoolBits over to Linux back in 2005, the only way to overclock your NVIDIA graphics card was using
NVClock. NVClock has been developed as a third-party open-source utility by Roderick Colenbrander and hosted at
SourceForge and
LinuxHardware.org. NVClock is accessible via the command-line as well as Qt and GTK interfaces. In addition to just overclocking the core and memory frequencies on NVIDIA graphics cards, NVClock also allows for some graphics cards to do pipeline soft-modding, enabling temperature sensors that have been disabled, OpenGL tweaks, and fan-speed adjustment. However, it looks like this project has faded away and that we may never see the final release of
NVClock v0.8.
There has been no CVS commits to the
SourceForge NVClock tree in two months, the project page hasn't been updated since May, and there doesn't appear to be activity elsewhere. The latest released version was NVClock 0.8 Beta 2 and that was released last year. Roderick had mentioned back in May that a third beta would be out soon, but that has yet to be seen. If work on NVClock is resurrected, we'll be sure to cover it. At least CoolBits is alive and well with the latest NVIDIA drivers...
Update (11-14-07): Roderick has updated the project's status on the
NVClock project page. NVClock is
not dead but a new beta will be pushed out once it supports the GeForce 8 series (with GeForce 8600 fan control).