Mission accomplished!

I am impressed with the overclocking potential of the Nvidia 8800GTS graphics card. My BFG version of this card managed to reach a stable overclock of Core Clock at 650 MHz and Memory Clock at 1000 MHz.

The first step in achieving these speeds was to increase the Core Clock from 600 MHz to 620 MHz and keeping the Memory Clock at 900 MHz. My usual series of tests proved the BFG 8800GTS graphics card to be stable and artifact-free at this clock speed. Nighthawk managed to score a high of 9439 3DMarks using 3DMark06. This score is an increase of 223 3DMarks over the previous high score with Core Clock at 600 MHz.

The next step step was increasing the Core Clock to 640 MHz. Note that Everest Ultimate reports the Core Clock at 648 MHz while ATIT00l 0.26 reports it as 640 MHz. Again, Nighthawk proved stable at this speed using my usual battery of tests. The top 3DMark06 benchmark score at this speed was 9567 3DMarks, an increase of 128 3DMarks.

The final step was to increase Core Clock to 660 MHz from 640 MHz and Memory Clock to 1000 MHz from 900 MHz. I normally do not like making more than one change at a time, but I decided to take a chance since I was perfectly content to fall back to the previous stable overclock setting, i.e., I really had nothing to lose and much to gain.

Note that while ATITool 0.26 shows the Core Clock to be both 650 and 660 MHz, Everest Ultimate shows the Core Clock to be both 648 and 660 MHz. I'll split the difference and call the Core Clock at 650 MHz. Can anybody explain the reason for this disparity? I wonder if my BFG 8800GTS graphics card has its Core Clock capped at 648 MHz. Remember that I first saw this reading when I set the Core Clock to 640 MHz in ATITool 0.26.

Regardless, the Core Clock is faster than the previous setting because the new 3DMark06 top score for Nighthawk is now 9605 3DMarks, an increase of 38 3DMarks. However, this small increase in 3DMark06 score may be die to the higher Memory Clock of 1000 MHz.

Here's the 3DMark06 comparison of these benchmarks.

This completes my BFG 8800GTS overclocking exercise. I am very pleased to have achieved a 26% overclock of my graphics card.

This also completes my Nighthawk overclocking exercise. I am also pleased that I was able to increase performance by slightly over 1000 3DMarks.

My Blog will continue with sharing my experiences installing Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, on Nighthawk, including a performance comparison of Vista with Windows XP MCE 2005 on the same hardware platform.