Overclocking a video card can be a useful way to eke a few more frames per second (fps) out of an aging card and postpone an upgrade a little longer. But it’s also worth taking a shot at running even a new video card at faster than the stock speeds. It just might net you the performance of a card costing $50 to 75 more, with no investment on your part except for some time and tweaking.

Case in point: The Nvidia GeForce GTX 460. When the card was launched, Nvidia mentioned that this card, built on a 40nm process that helps keep heat low and equipped with a beefy cooler for a card in its price range, had plenty of headroom for overclocking. And the company wasn’t kidding: Just by tweaking a couple of numbers in Nvidia’s Control Panel, we were able to see a significant speedup in some of today’s most demanding games. If you bought the GTX 460 while wondering if you should have shelled out the extra cash for the higher-end GTX 465, you’ll be quite pleased to know you card is capable of running even faster than its more expensive big brother.

In this overclocking guide, we take the stock video card and, using nothing more than software available from the card’s designer and some trial-and-error, determine just how fast it can run without introducing instability to the system.