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I just picked up a used BFG 9600 GT OC on Ebay. Before I installed it in my system, I cleaned the heatsink of dust etc. Downloaded the newest drivers, card worked just fine. I decided to see if the card could be overclocked further, so I downloaded Rivatuner, and started tweaking. The stock specs are 675/900. I got the card up to 750/975 with a +7% gain in 3DMark06. At 775/1000 the card would either crash or overheat running 3DMark...screen would go blank....say "no signal"...my PC would keep running, and I would hear the video card fan speed up.

I read there might be some driver fan control issues with the 9 series cards....so I manually set the fan to 100% in Rivatuner....set the video card to 775/1000 and it completed 3DMark just fine. The card is running back at 675/900 now....after some real-life benchmarking I was only gaining about 3fps....not worth overheating issues.

Anyone else have similar experiences? Or have any additional insight?

The 9600GT isn't really an extreme card, and overclocking it will only result in very minimal performance gains as you are seeing. Most people would say to just leave it at stock, especially since BFG isn't a market player anymore and thus might not be able to replace the product if it breaks.

Either way the BFG 9600GT doesn't really have a huge heatsink, so pushing it past its regular limitations makes sense that you would have overheating issues...especially if you don't have a crazy high CFM case (presuming you don't if you are using a 9600GT).