8800GT G92, 8800GTS G92, the new masters of DirectX 10

Page 11 - Overclocking

Naturally for a site, where the Overclock and hardware Tune-Up is praised, such as we are at ModReactor, is to show what expectations for overclock potential the new owner of a G92 based video controllers can indulge. The showed frequencies below were absolutely stable for every single game but the test we used to illustrate the difference in performance was 3DMark06.

There is also a very important fact to mention. WHQL 169.75 NVIDIA driver, which was used, obviously has some issues under Vista x64, which resulted in the following. The referent video controller cooling has thermal control, which is managed by the driver. When the video card is cool or with temperature in the 50-60 degree range, it works at 1/3 of its RPMs – completely silent. When the core temperature rises, the fan speed also rises proportionally to provide suitable and safe work temperature. Well, under Vista x64 this didn’t work for neither G92 controller in the review! The cards’ temperatures reached 90 degrees in the toughest tests, which is completely normal, but the fan stayed at the lowest speed possible. Lets bear in mind that the tests were carried on stand, which means the hardware was not inside a case, so it can be easily changed between tests. And as it is winter now, the room temperature varied between 16-18 degrees. In a poorly ventilated case and room temperature about 22-25 degrees this would lead to damage to the video card pretty fast. As far as we saw on foreign hardware sites, these incidents are common.

For overclock tests, the cooling was set manually to 80% from its maximum speed, which provided much lower work temperature and also the opportunity to see what G92 is capable of in means of overclocking.

Our Albatron 8800GT successfully managed frequencies of 710MHz core, 1780MHz stream processors, 2060MHz memory and could successfully pass 3DMark06 at slightly higher core frequency (about 5-10MHz), but the previously mentioned frequencies are stable under any application.

On its part, MSI NX 8800GT OC Edition despite its default overclocked frequencies, reached 705MHz core (not completely stable in Crysis, on the third loop at 1680x1050 and 4x Antialiasing the game crashed and the video driver displayed error) and again 1030MHz (2060MHz) memory. This led to the conclusion that if you chose a referent card and you want to overclock without previously testing, you can have the same expectations to all referent 8800GT G92 controllers – it's all about luck.

Things look different with 8800GTS G92. The controller managed completely stable frequencies of 810MHz and 2040MHz memory, becoming ultimate leader in every competition, compared to its predecessors. The following table presents the performance of MSI 8800GTS 512 G92 OC, MSI 8800GT 512 G92 OC and Albatron 8800GT 512 G92 – default and overclocked frequencies.

These tests were made on default air cooling. Due to the fact that the cores produce huge amounts of heat, using a good heatpipe cooler or even water cooling will lead to completely different frequencies.