NVClock v0.8 BETA Preview

Shipping with NVClock 0.8 is an entirely re-designed GUI front-end for NVClock with both the GTK and Qt versions. Launching the GTK2 interface, its new appearance quickly reminded us of the nvidia-settings layout, which is enticingly easy to navigate and use. Similar to NVClock 0.7, on the main page is the video card information that consists of the graphics processor, GPU architecture, BIOS version, bus type, video memory, memory type, and IRQ. Branching off the main page are options and information for overclocking, video BIOS, hardware monitoring, pipelines, OpenGL general, image quality, and settings. Moving onto the video card overclocking page the overclocking can be enabled than there are two sliders for respectively changing the GPU and memory clock values. Due to a lack of graphics card availability with for the GeForce 6 and 7 series by Roderick Colenbrander, the main NVClock developer, overclocking these latest cards is now reverted through a low-level backend and through NVIDIA's CoolBits. Like many other NVIDIA overclocking applications, when overclocking, the option is available to test the newly specified speeds before permanently applying the frequencies, to alert the user before the system may experience failure or artifacts. One feature missing was the ability to automatically detect the optimal frequencies for the GPU core and memory. As the latest NVIDIA cards run at different 2D and 3D frequencies, through the video BIOS page, the different performance levels are stated along with the voltage levels. If your video card manufacturer chose to utilize one of the supported sensor chips by NVClock or enabled the on-die internal sensor, the GPU temperature is displayed in Celsius from the hardware monitoring page. Also, depending upon the GPU, the ambient temperature may be displayed along with a sliding bar for controlling the fan-speed. During testing, we did notice some peculiar differences in the GPU core temperature between what was reported by NVClock and the NVIDIA thermal monitor. Through the pipelines page the number of active units and configuration for the pixel pipelines with the number of vertex shaders are displayed. Yet another one of the NVClock GTK pages similar to what can be found in nvidia-settings is the Open GL information, which brandishes the OpenGL vendor, render, direct rendering, and version. The settings branching off the OpenGL page are sync to VBlank, allow flipping, disable CPU optimizations, and texture clamping. The Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering can be over-rode from 1x to 16x. Furthermore, texture sharpening can be initialized. Ending off the GTK2 interface for the NVClock 0.8 BETA is the settings panel which has respective check-boxes for showing tool tips, saving OpenGL settings, and using the low-level overclocking backend.