How to get most out of your graphics card

This is not to say that first-party utilities are useless, but designed to meet the needs of basic users all the way up to advanced users, the usefulness of such utilities for advanced users is sometimes sacrificed to meet others needs. Overclocking, cooling, feature settings, performance tweaking, and stability testing are all important aspects for getting the most out of an enthusiast level video card, and some utilities are better than others at handling these needs. Unfortunately most video card utilities are tailored for one side or the other, complicating matters as a good utility for a GeForce card may not even be usable on a Radeon card and vice-versa.

In the next few pages, we'll take a look at the most popular utilities, what they work with, what they work best at, and what's still lacking. Getting the most of your system requires not just the right hardware, but the right software to go with it.