Page 9 - Overclocking

Performance - Overclocking
Of course with most videocards we can do some easy tricks to boost the overall performance a little. It's called overclocking the videocard and by increasing the frequency of the videocards memory and gpu we can make the videocard increase it's 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 that frequency any higher then 5-10% of the core and memory clock. Example: if your card would run at 300 MHz then I suggest you don't increase that frequency any higher than 330 MHz.

More advanced users push that frequency often way higher. Usually when memory starts to show white dots 'snow' you should go down 10 MHz and leave it at that. The core can be somewhat different. Usually when you are clocking to hard it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. I recommend that you back down at least 10-15 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well.

All in all .. do it at your own risk. Overclocking your card too fast or constantly to it's limit might damage your card and it's not covered by your warranty.

You will benefit from overclocking the most with product that is limited or you may called it 'tuned down'. Now then, we know that this graphics core is likely more powerful then what we have seen in the previous benchmarks. Therefore by increasing the memory and core frequency we should be able to witness some higher performance results.

Will the cooling solution help cooling down the graphics card enough for a nice overclock ?

Overclocking wise the Geforce FX 5900 definitely showed some potential. We where able to boost it up towards 500 MHz for the core, which is a really nice number. At that frequency the card remained completely stable. Memory results maxed out at around 948 (2x 474) MHz. As we are doing in all our reviews lately, we'll include the overclocking result in all benchmarks. So on the next pages you'll see the OC results on 500 core and 948 MHz memory.

We did several tests which are made with, Quake III Arena  Splinter Cell, Unreal 2003, Unreal2: Unforgiven and do not forget about Doom and Serious Sam. All tests where made in 32 bit colors in resolutions ranging from 800x600 up-to the Godfather of all gaming resolutions, the 1600x1200 screen mode with all kinds of performance/quality settings.