MSI N9600GT ZILENT review

Page 9 - 3DMark06 and Overclock

Synthetic test are done last. The truth that more and more people begin to understand is that those tests are highly overrated. Years ago when versions 99 and 2001 of the famous 3DMark test began gathering popularity as a frequent gamers test, and a high result became a mark of a good video card, the companies began to optimize their drivers and chips to be capable to prove themselves in any of the latest 3DMark “disciplines”.

Many people spend hundreds or even thousand of dollars just to obtain computer capable of “playing 3DMark”. And they still exist! But even if you're not one of them, you still might want to know how will your video card perform in 3DMark, is it in the best results of it's rang compared to card ana computer. Now after showing how the cards are holding on in the the most recent and heavy games, we cannot miss the opportunity to give you the delight of the synthetic test:

There is not much that can be said about the results, they are just points that don't really give you anything solid. It is likely though things will change with the upcoming 3DMark Vantage, which has full DirectX 10 support and on which engine a game is to be based. It's just that 3DMark06 too old...

And at last the long awaited overclock test!

At ModReactor we had already reviewed 3 models of GeForce 9600 GT based cards, amongst which two referent (PoV 9600 GT and XFX 9600 GT), and one non-referent MSI - N9600GT T2D512-OC (which impressed us greatly). So our experience suggests that they overclock up to about 740-750 MHz for the core, and accordingly 1900MHz for the shaders and about 2050-2070MHz for the memory, all this without software or hardware modifications. But not here! First of all, MSI N9600GT ZILENT 1GB is with shader that doesn't operate at 2.5 ratio to the cards core frequency, but at a lowered one. This remains strange and unexplained for us (though easily correctable with software such as RivaTuner). Second, the core overclocks just as in any other cards - precisely 750MHz stable. Disappointing yes, but indeed most disappointing (yet predictable) was the card's memory overclock. It worked without defects at the measly 50MHz overclock (100 effective) - with more memory overclock we got dots and lines all over the screen after brief testing. After all the memory isn't covered by radiators and the chips are being with double capacity... So the additional performance increase was small enough, not to provoke us to run the test again and show the results.

And now let's wrap it up, and draw a conclusion in few lines.