Q1 2004 Vendor Graphics Card Roundup

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.