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Overclocking a Tv-card

Overclocking your CPU gives you extra processing cycles which in turn speeds up general operations on your PC. Overclocking your Graphics card gives you more frames-per-second (fps) with which to see and shoot your mates at a LAN party. Overclocking your Tv-card gives you access to thousands more channels, dulby digital surround sound, HDTv and lots of heat.

As with CPU and graphics cards, the heat is the problem. If we can dissipate the heat we can push our Tv-cards that little bit further.

I'm going to show you the results of my experiments using conventional cooling methods. What I'm not going to show you are some of the more extreme overclocking methods that I've tried. Frankly it'll scare you and I could be arrested.


Method 1 - Heatsinks and fans

Applying a standard celeron/socket 7 heatsink and fan (applied with thermal paste) achieved a heat reduction of some 12 degrees Celsius. This alone allowed the Tv-card to be overclocked to receive 7 sports channels, 3 documentary channels and 237 cheap american white-trash so-called chat-show channels. Which is nice.



The theory behind heat-sink heat-dissipation is that greater surface area, greater heat-conductivity and greater airflow produce greater cooling. Great.
It takes no mental-giant to deduce that these principles have already been applied to many household objects.


Simply applying a frying pan with Lard resulted in a heat reduction of 24 degrees Celsius. This allowed the Tv-card to be overclocked to a whopping 89 sports channels, 17 shopping channels and 67 24-hour weather channels. Not only that, but at this level of overclocking, the Tv-card will produce 47-speaker dulby surround sound (on those channels that support it).


Method 2 - Water cooling

Peltiers and heat exchangers can go swim.

Serious cooling requires serious H2O and that can only be applied with a decent power washer.

With 1600 PSI (110 BAR) of water pressure, this baby could take the grin off Leonardo DiCaprios face in under a minute.

I simply pointed the spray at the decoder chip on the Tv-card and pushed her until she squealed.

A total of 893 channels with dulby digital 9.2 at HDTv resolution is seriously unbelievable!

It all worked a treat although I couldn't hear the Tv over the sound of the power washer and I had to watch in wet weather gear. My other PC components complained about the gallons of water, but what the heck.


Method 3 - More power

Maximum performance requires lots of power. So I attached a 920 Volt 4-phase power supply; which proved adequate.


Connected directly to the Tv-card with jump-leads, the extra power source made the Tv-card really smoke!!

The rest of this article is written 3 weeks later from my hospital bed.

Conclusion

Overclockers should rejoice at the prospect of being able to push a mass-produced consumer electronics circuit way beyond its sensible design limits. Why pay more for the better model when you can waste hundreds of pounds/dollars/euros creating wacky contraptions that push your Tv-card to just below the performance of the new model which will be available next week at half the price.

No animals were harmed in the production of this article.
Well, cats aren't really animals are they ? And 'harmed' is such a broad term...

DISCLAIMER
 We accept no responsibility or liability for damage or loss caused by your lame attempts to reproduce any of these experiments. Do not get your Tv-card wet. Always use a condom. Do not put any more power into your Tv-card. Say no to drugs. Do not try to find the hidden registry settings that enable overclocking. Do not apply heatsinks with Lard.




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