I got the ati tool and have been experimenting with different clock speds. my question is, when i sart seeing artifacts, am i causing damage to my card?

When you overclock something you run more power through it than it was designed for, its very possible that you damaged it while overclocking.

Concider yourself lucky, one person overclocked his processer to such an extent it actually imploded upon itself and created an, albeit brief, distortion in the space/time continuum.

There is a time and a place for being an asshole. While this might very well be that place, it isn't the time. The time would be after someone tells the poor kid that when you start to see artifacts, it means your graphics card is, in fact, pushed past the limit to a "healthy" overclock. Clocking it back down to stock settings should fix that issue.

As most graphic cards don't have voltage settings you can play with without volt-mods, the likelihood of permanently damaging the card should be rather low. That said, if you did, in fact damage the card, it sucks to be you.

I mis-read his post, i thought that he was seeing artifacts after experimenting and then returning it to normal. There were no intentions of being an asshole, just deadpan humor on my part.

I'm sorry that I accused you of such things that weren't your intention to have. I guess I was just putting myself too much into your actions, as I'd have said the same thing if he went and said that it wasn't his fault or something.

Sorry to highjack the thread but is anyone familiar with an Nvidia overclocking utility designed for Linux? (7600GT AGP).

Yeah your card should be fine as long as it runs the same at factory settings.

I'd suggest asking in Everything *NIX, or even think about looking on http://www.overclock.net/

well from what i understand artifacts mean you have taken the overclock too far, luckily it seems to be pretty hard to kill a graphics card so what you should do is overclock till you see the artifacts, then scale it back until you dont see them anymore

i dont think its causing any real damage unless you like leave it there artifacting for hours on end or something

Download coolbits - a registry file that enables advanced options in the nVIDIA control panel. You can also download Rivatuner - extremely flexible GPU overclocking utility.

overclock rule of thumb:

overclock till you'r just getting artifact's

check temp's if temp's are ok

back overclock off by 10%