GeForce 7900GT Dual Core Masterpiece - Page 11

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/02/2006 02:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

Overclocking & Tweaking

As most of you with videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.

What do we need?
One of the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download here. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.

Where should we go ?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less then a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 500 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 25 to 50 MHz.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today tested cards anyway but we'll show it still ;)

All in all... do it at your own risk.

Galaxy GeForce 7900 GT Dual Core

	Reference clock 7900 GT	Default on this model	Maximum overclock
GPU clock (3D)	450 MHz	600 MHz	666 MHz
Memory Clock	1320 MHz	1520 MHz	1600 MHz

The overclock for the Masterpiece card was not bad at all. In fact we boosted performance towards two 7900 GTX 512MB performance. After these clocks the cores are simply getting too hot to overclock.

Our overclock scores were very impressive to look at. We in this case used 3DMark, which obviously we won't do again with overclocking on a single-core CPU :)

Sidenote: Our overclocking results are never a guarantee for your home grown results. Manufacturers' choices in components differ often per batch and so will the end-result. This however is a good indication of what is (or isn't) possible.

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