Overclocking Comparison
Unfortunately, ATI doesn't have a utility on the level of NVIDIA's coolbit's registry tweak. We decided to use the ATI Tray Tool for our overclocking needs, as it has a built-in artifact tester. Now, I wouldn't trust it to find a final overclock speed, but it does a good job of finding a maximum from which to work down. The little 3D application just doesn't push the GPU enough to really make it fail if it's going to fail at a certain clock.It's a little trickier to overclock ATI GPU's than NVIDIA's. Artifacts are harder to notice, and stability is more a question of whether you can get through a run without CPU recover kicking you out of your application. Regardless, we generally followed the same methodology that we used to overclock our 6600GTs.
The maximum overclock that we see is the PowerColor's 15.3% increase to 490MHz core clock speed. The 8.5% overclock of the ABIT 128MB card is less than what we expected to hit. We don't think that this was a temperature related issue, as the ABIT heatsink is heavy, mounted well, has a lot of surface area, and sounds like it moves plenty of air. Of course, if cooling was the only thing that mattered, the HIS card would have done better than PowerColor.
As far as memory clock goes, it looks like something between 980 and 990 is what we can expect to see from overclocked X700 cards. All of these cards would run at about 990, but we had to drop the frequency of the ABIT, HIS, and Sapphire cards in order to maintain stability over extended periods of operation.
It is interesting that the 2ns RAM can't quite reach 500MHz on ATI cards, but soars to 600MHz on NVIDIA cards in some cases. This indicates that ATI is pushing latencies first while NVIDIA is focusing on bandwidth.
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Gaia Hunter - Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - link
@11:Dont forget most 6800 vanillas can easly be softmoded with rivatuner:
-All will get the 6th vertex unit;
-Good chance of getting the additionall 4 pixel pipes too.
I was able to go to 16,6. That gave me a 25% boost in 3dmark03 and 33% bost in 3dmark05.~
Also consider 6800 LE (around $250). Most can get 12 pipes and 5 vertex. If u get lucky u can get to 16,6.
While u cant always do this, consider that nvidia is implementing a new way to mask the Pipilines! think about that :)
Questar - Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - link
>>Mid range and PCIe dont mix right now. who would get mid range card if they were dishing out big bucks to get a PCIe setup??Me. Assuming 3Ghz is midrange.
Alphafox78 - Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - link
Mid range and PCIe dont mix right now. who would get mid range card if they were dishing out big bucks to get a PCIe setup?? AGP still has 98% market share, but I guess the 2% high end stuff is worth forgetting agp over.DerekWilson - Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - link
#18the wildcat is a professional card, not a consumer level card. the wildcat realizm 200 competes with the quadro, not the geforce.
nurazlanshah - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
im just wondering, why dont people just use 3dlabs wildcat realizm 200 if they really want the best computer and if they have the money? i would do that.http://www.3dlabs.com/products/product.asp?prod=29...
skunkbuster - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
#16, i think they do that in order to eliminate the cpu as being a bottleneckalexlck - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
nice review but there is something that i don't understand.When people is looking for a mid-range video card, they are usually having a medicore setup. so what's the point to test a mid-range card with a
$1,000+ CPU?
can you please retest those cards with 3Ghz/3000+ cpu?
Which, i think, will give some more realistic results.
ShadowVlican - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
i can confirm #12 statement about the "2004 Performance" cause i see that too.. stoopid ad :/too bad ati... better bring out the new X800s now and lower the price too :D cause ur X700Pro can't touch the 6600gt :P
DerekWilson - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
Thanks Pete. Corrected the typo.Pete - Monday, December 13, 2004 - link
Hey Derek, slight typo in the Doom 3 benches. I think you mwant to say AA rather than aniso in the first sentence, as HQ mode in D3 uses 8xAF by default.Sorry, I can't get as excited about this article as the last simply b/c the cards are uninspiring. Better luck next SKU, ATI.