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 100 MHz then I suggest you don't increase that frequency any higher than 110 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 ?
As I stated in the beginning of this review, the core of the Ti 4800SE graphics card is normally clocked in 3D mode at 275MHz. Memory in total is 128 MB DDR memory and clocked at 2x275(550) MHz
The card was good for a nice overclock way beyond Ti 4600 specifications. The results (while remaining stability and image quality) was 330MHz for the core and 675 MHz for the memory. We did a few test runs:
Quake III Arena |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
1600x1200 |
Albatron Ti 4800 SE |
198 |
170 |
134 |
300/600 |
199 |
176 |
142 |
320/635 |
201 |
181 |
148 |
330/650 |
201 |
183 |
151 |
330/675 |
201 |
184 |
153 |
AquaMark |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
1600x1200 |
Albatron Ti 4800 SE 330/675 |
69 |
60 |
45 |
Albatron Ti 4800 SE |
67 |
52 |
38 |
GeForce4 Ti 4600 |
67 |
55 |
40 |
Radeon 9700 |
71 |
59 |
43 |
Radeon 9700 Pro |
73 |
64 |
49 |
As you can see the results are very nice. In Quake III 1600x1200 we bumped up from 134 towards 153 FPS while Aquamark gains another 7 FPS in that resolution. It's a very good overclocker, especially the core frequency produces very good results that show themselves off in the results.