Overclocking: 3D Mark 2006

Overclocking the video card can be very risky, but from my experience I'd say that it is still a pretty safe way to increase the gaming performance of your brand new video card, unless you start doing volt modifications off course. The GPU design and manufacturing quality is mostly related to the overclocking capabilities of a certain video card, in that way we have seen graphic cards gaining less then 10% performance while others can boost frame rate up to 30%! Pushing hardware to the limit to see how fast it can go seems to be of interest to a larger than expected crowd, I recon some of you are probable looking at this page just to know how much they can get for free, here is what I found out about today's tested product.



We managed to hit core clocks up to 800MHz and with that we got stability of the shaders up to the 2000MHz borderline too. With clocks like this it looks like NVIDIA is getting quite good yields out of there new cores, I still remember how the G80 was in a thug fight for just 700MHz, with voltage modifications! The memory clock rate could be increased from 1100 MHz up to 1250 MHz, this is an astonishing result since the out-of-the-box clock as utterly high all ready. With that the memory bandwidth increases over 13%, but even now the total memory bandwidth doesn't exceed the standard memory bus bandwidth of the 8800GTX (86,4 Gb/s).

In 3D Mark 2006 these higher clocks brought us quite close to the 15k barrier, using only one GPU this result is quite good. But take note that with a 13% higher memory clock, a 19% higher shader clock, and an 18% higher core clock we got only around 9% extra 3D Mark performance. Curious how that reflects in gaming performance?

Overclocking: Colin McRae D.I.R.T.

The card had no problems with stability over longer period of intensive gaming. Let's have a look at our CM Dirt chart:



We got some pretty good results after manually increasing the clock rate. The average frame rate in D.I.R.T. increased with 8 frames per second, this is over 16% extra performance! Not just average, the extra clocks made the card come out a lot faster over the entire test run.

With the card still at default voltages we are very keen to find out how it scales if we could give it some more juice. We hope to soon find out how higher voltages can yield even better results. Stay tuned I'd say. Onto our temperature and noise comparisons ->