eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition
 |
|
If you've read every page of this review, it should be obvious that the eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, and quite frankly all of the cards we've tested here, are extremely fast and are clearly superior to the previous generation 4-Pipe and 8-Pipe cards. But there's just something about overclocking a card to its limit that appeals to us! As fast as the eVGA GF 6800 EE was, we thought we could make it a little faster by overclocking it a bit...
We used the Coolbits registry tweak to enabled the Clock Frequency sliders in NVIDIA's Forceware drivers, and raised the eVGA card's core and memory clock speeds slowly until our test system became unstable. Please keep in mind that the "Extreme Edition" GeForce 6800 Ultra cards are technically pre-overclocked Ultras, so expecting huge overclocks from any EE would be unrealistic. In the end, we were only able to increase the default core and memory clock speeds of 450MHz / 1.2GHz to only 462MHz / 1.26GHz. We re-ran the high-resolution Aquamark 3 and Doom 3 tests at these higher clock speeds to see what kind of performance gains were afforded by the higher clocks and saw some minor gains. In AQ3, the eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition's frame rate increased by just over 1 FPS. In Doom 3 though, we only gained .6 FPS.
