Half-Life 2

Overclocking

We decided to add overclocking to our testing suite with new cards and drivers. Many enthusiasts already like to push the limits on their hardware, and we would be remiss if we did not do a little overclocking of our own. Although NVIDIA did not add an overclocking tab in the driver control panel it can be unlocked by using Coolbits, which is available on the web. As always we will warn you that overclocking voids your warranty and can shorten the lifespan of your hardware. You will probably do it anyway but we had to make that disclaimer. For the tests we used the standard aluminum cooler that came with our reference cards.

Using the 78.01 driver

Using the 81.85 driver

The 78.01 allowed us to get the card's core up to 526 MHz and the memory up to 1.38 GHz (Stock is 430 MHz core and 1.2 GHz memory). The score we obtained using the default settings in 3DMark 2005 yielded a score of 12,672 in SLI. The 81.85 driver allowed us to turn up the frequencies to 524 MHz for the core and 1.40 GHz for the memory. This configuration yielded six more marks for a total of 12,678 in SLI. This is a minuscule boost to the performance, and therefore we consider both to be equal in the overclocking department.