8800 GTX Clock Speeds Achieved

In my prior post, I was able to overclock my BFG 8800GTS to a Core Clock of 575 MHz (the same speed as the BFG 8800GTX) and a Memory Clock of 850 Mhz. The next milestone I wanted to achieve was to reach the 900 MHz Memory Clock speed of the BFG 8800 GTX.

The first step was to increase the Memory Clock of my BFG 8800GTS graphics card to 875 MHz. After 2 hours of checking for artifacts using ATITool 0.26 and countless more hours running the three Nvidia 8800 Tech Demos (Smoke, Adrianne, and Froggy) to visually check for artifacts, my BFG 8800GTS appeared to be stable with no signs of any artifact.

I ran the 3DMark06 benchmark three times and Nighthawk scored 9042 3DMarks on its best run, an improvement of only 11 3DMarks over its best score at a Memory Clock of 850 MHz. Here's the 3DMark comparison.

The next step was to increase the Memory Clock to 900 MHz. I repeated the same routine of running ATITool 0.26 for over 2 hours to check for artifacts, and running the Nvidia 8800 Tech Demos (Smoke, Adrianne, and Froggy) for extended period of time to visually check for artifacts and to monitor the GPU temperature.

No artifacts were detected. The BFG 8800GTS running at 8800GTX speeds passed the tests with flying colors.

However, the performance benchmarks results using 3DMark06 were disappointing. My BFG 8800GTS running at 8800GTX speeds (Core Clock of 575 MHz and Memory Clock of 900 MHz) was unable to reach, much less, top its previous highest score of 9042 3DMarks achieved at a lower 875 MHz. Its results at the 900 MHz Memory Clock speed were: 8998, 9021, 9012, 9003, 9015 and 9018 3DMarks.

It is obvious that incremental increase in memory speed yields minimal, if any, performance improvement. When it comes to memory, I believe that better latency instead of faster clock speed contributes more to improved performance.

BFG Technologies now also has a BFG 8800GTX OC (Overclocked) graphics card which runs at a Core Clock of 600 MHz and a Memory Clock of 900 MHz. That's my next target. Will my 8800GTS hold up at these speeds?