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Overclocking your graphics card will not turn your aging Geforce 2 into an FX5900,
but it can be a good way of extending the life of an old card a little, or to
squeeze every last drop of performance out of a new card.
In the recent DirectX
9 graphics card round up, the Sparkle FX5900 and the Gainward FX5900 had
a difference of 140mhz RAM speed, yet the difference in performance was only
172 3dmarks or around 3.6%, despite a 20% boost in clock speed. This intrigued
us enough to see what possible benefits there could be from overclocking, by
testing out a few of the cards while we still had our hands on them.
Your card may come with some overclocking tools as standard, if not, you may
need to download a tool for this. Powerstrip
is one of the most popular utilities for this.
We pushed our cards to the limits and recorded the results. Stock benchmarks
were taken straight from the round up, settings for the test bed were kept identical.
The Results
First up is the Gainward FX5900 which clocks in at 400mhz Core/710mhz RAM.
We had the card at 416/750mhz. We have a feeling the RAM could go further, but
the bundled software wouldn't allow it.
| 3dMark 2001 |
3dMark 2003 |
Aquamark 3 |
| Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
| 15,703 |
15,797 |
0.6% |
4,717 |
4,848 |
2.8% |
37,566 |
38,844 |
3.4% |
Next up is the Asus 9600XT. We managed to increase the GPU speed from 500mhz
to 550mhz, but the RAM wouldn't overclock in the slightest.
| 3dMark 2001 |
3dMark 2003 |
Aquamark 3 |
| Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
| 13,283 |
13,730 |
3.4% |
3,838 |
3,990 |
4% |
31,308 |
33,201 |
6% |
And finally, the Asus 9800XT. This was the fastest card in the round up and
we managed to increase from 412mhz to 433mhz on the core but strangely, once
again, nothing on the RAM.
| 3dMark 2001 |
3dMark 2003 |
Aquamark 3 |
| Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
Stock |
Overclocked |
Difference |
| 18,286 |
18,496 |
1.1% |
6,423 |
6,709 |
4.5% |
46,156 |
47,586 |
3.1% |
Conclusion
Overclocking your 200mhz Pentium to 233mhz made a considerable difference.
As did running your Geforce 2 MX RAM at 30mhz more than it's stock 150mhz. Back
then, it wouldn't have been uncommon to notice 20-30% difference in performance
from spending 20 minutes overclocking your card..
Much like modern day processors, as clock speeds are getting higher and higher,
any overclocking we can gain seems to react much like a drop in the ocean. As
you can see above, we struggled to even get 5% improvement out of our cards.
This makes us wonder, why even bother?
But, saying this, a 10% increase of core speed on the 9600xt did give us about
3.5-6% increase in performance, which isn't a bad ratio. But this is still nothing
to shout about. It would almost seem like graphics card manufacturers pushing
the limits for us already.
I think the two 5900's on test are an excellent example of how the choice is
now down to architecture rather than the Mhz alone.
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