Clock Speeds
Here is the page where we tell you just how fast we could make these cards run. Some of these cards reached amazing speeds. Of course, we must mention that every card is different and that just because we were able to reach certain speeds, it doesn't mean everyone will be able to do so. In addition to being able to see how well a representative from each camp faired in our tests, we will also be able to see the effects of overclocking on each type of card (i.e. what benefits we can expect when we crank up the juice).Since each category of cards that we tested has different architectures and default clock speeds, it doesn't make sense to compare the clock speeds of other types of cards. Therefore, we've divided our graphs into sections, against each architecture that we will be testing. Check out our results:
With two of these cards being reference versions, we can kind of see the ball park that can be expected for 9800 cards to hit with stock cooling. We can also see that Crucial's 9800 Pro can almost match stock 9800XT speeds, which is a very nice thing if you want the extra power for a little less money. Of course, we'll have to pay attention to what the cards do in the benchmarks, to see if this means anything worth while. It is, again, important to note that these cards are running on a 150nm process, which helps to explain why we are not able to get significantly higher overclocking numbers.
For some reason, the HIS card was able to reach for the stars on our overclock. It isn't apparent why HIS would have such a highly overclockable card, and it could be that the variance in stability/overclockability among 9600XT GPUs is just much greater than the 9800XT GPUs. To be fair, Sapphire's solution is passive, and the Gigabyte card clocked fairly high as well, so we really don't have enough data to explain everything.
Anywhere from 50MHz to 100MHz overclock is pretty nice here. With clock speeds like these, the benchmarks are definitely interesting.
We can see that most of the similar cards hit similar clocks here with the MSI 5700 Ultra at a slight advantage.
These cards managed to snuggle right up against their 800MHz data rate limit, and even though the 9800 Pro lags the XT cards, it still puts in a good showing.
Again, we are hitting the limits of the RAM as the 2.8ns used should not be able to get past a 714MHz data rate.
MSI and LeadTek are the clear leaders in RAM speed with everything else lagging way behind near the 1GHz DDR barrier. This may or may not help in the end. If these cards could clock so high because they had higher latencies, any benefit may just come out in the wash.
With Sparkle, MSI, and Gainward hitting well over 1GHz, its hard to believe that this is 2.2ns RAM. We kept going back to check the Samsung website and the chips on the cards to make sure we were reading everything right.
The final thing to note is that Sparkle's 5950 Platinum and Gainward's 5950 Golden Sample cards both come preset to run at 500/1000 (core/mem), and are guaranteed to run at those speeds. To reiterate, both Gainward Golden Sample cards we tested had some issues running completely stable with a memory speed of 1000, but since Gainward garantees their cards at that speed, we figured it would be best to run the card at that speed rather than clock it down. We will continue to work with Gainward to try to understand what the issue is with the cards.
The Sparkle card ran fine at 500/1000, but it really didn't like having its clocks tampered with. Of course, you do get the guarantee that your card will run at 500/1000 without any messy overclocking and danger of screwing up your card.
Sapphire and HIS's 9600XT cards come with their memory pre-overclocked to a 650MHz data rate.
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vss1980 - Wednesday, March 10, 2004 - link
I'm surprised there weren't more DirectX9 games tested.I must admit its annoying when review sites test with only 1 or 2 older games and focus on just 3Dmark and new game tests, but considering all those cards are DX9 cards the lack of DX9 testing isn't right.
anthonyv - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
please recheck the charts on p.25... I think the charts, chart titles, and text are mixed up.Cheers,
..anthony
Atlas5 - Sunday, February 29, 2004 - link
I'm not sure that a comparison of such limited depth is all that useful to someone trying to figure out if upgrading to a new card is worthwhile. Try this review...http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/inde...
...if you're looking to compare more than what's hit the streets in the last 9 months.
mkseidl - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
You can d/l the coolbits reg edit which will add a tab to your display settings to overclock the video card with simple sliders. Just to compare with your FFXI my score was 3800 :)(I haven't run the benchmark with my card oc'd)I have
Asus a7v8x
xp1700 @ 2.25ghz
evga geforceFX 5900se
1gb pc2100
sata raid 0 array 240gb
dvd +/- burner
lian li case
I have a question, on hot hardware they got their evga up to 471/871mhz
But I can only gt mine up to 429\820
which is about a 50mhz diff? is that average for cards? I know not all cards/procs can oc the sae. but shouldn't it be closer?
Martin
mkseidl@hotmail.com
mincheng - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
Can anyone tell me how to overclock the video cards??? I know that when you OC a cpu you gotta go to BIOS, but I just don't understand how Video Card overclocking works? I currently own a PNY FX5600 Ultra and a P4 3.06Ghz/533L2Cache - overclocked to 3.45Ghz and a 1Ghz of PC800 RDRAM. Scored 3437 on FFXI benchmark ver.2 . I really want to OC my video card so I can get better speed. And if you know how to OC then can you please e-mail me at hhsu@socal.rr.com? THANKS!mkseidl - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
Just out of curiosity, how did you guys overclock the video cards? I can't find anything in my drivers or bios to overclock my card. After reading your benchmarks, I purchased a evga 5900se. I upgraded from Gefoce2 Ultra3dMark01 - Geforce 2 was 5013 and my Fx was 9109
Is that a big jump?
And in the FFXI benchmark I went from 1900 to 3800
But I want to overclock the crap out of it like my proc ;)
Martin
Pete - Wednesday, February 11, 2004 - link
Last nitpicks: box shots and bundle listings would have been useful, and part numbers and stock speeds should have been mandatory on each card's page. Considering most vendors offer multiple versions of each product, not clearly marking which card was tested in this overclocking roundup seems like a rather glaring omission. NewEgg now seems to offer a High Tek (HIS) 9600XT, but I can't tell if that's the same one as in your review, or even if stock memory speed for HIS cards is 600 or 650MHz. Your only mentions of memory speeds are at the ends of pages 15 and 16, somewhat removed from each card's product page. I think it would have much clearer and more helpful if you had mentioned that both Sapphire's and HIS' 9600XT's ship with their memory at 650MHz either in their product pages, or directly under the memory overclocking graph.Pete - Sunday, February 8, 2004 - link
Derek, Indig0's reply is slightly worying. I hope people aren't getting the wrong impression of anyone's performance based on a single sample's overclocked performance in only three benchmarks. If the samples were sent to you by each AIB, that's even more worrying, as who's to say they weren't cherry-picked?In fact, not indicating both the clock speeds and the fact that the cards were overclocked on each benchmark graph seems like a gross oversight. If the Flash format is preventing you from doing so, then changing it should be a priority. But if you can add two lines of description for each card (which it looks like you have plenty of room for), I'd amend the review.
For future overclocking reviews, I think it'd be much more useful to at least show the percentage improvements in both clock speed and framerate in the game benchmark charts. Sure, you've covered this earlier in the article, but it's a long article, and there's no point in forcing people to continually flip back and forth when it's relatively simple to add this data to the graphs. Ideally, I'd have liked to see two graphs for each card, one for stock and one for OC'ed speed, with the clock speeds in the card title and the percent improvement over stock speed right after the OC'ed speed bar. I think you can cram a lot more useful data into those graphs. :)
Stlr22 - Sunday, February 8, 2004 - link
I would love to see benchmarks at 1600x1200. That's the sweetspot that I always play games at so I'd would like to see what kinda CPU/GPU combo it's gonna take to get smooth game play at that level.
Nemesis77 - Friday, February 6, 2004 - link
This review is getting alot of flack from the folks at Beyond3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1013...