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You certainly
have to posses some serious intestinal fortitude, if you are
going to overclock a $499 Graphics Card. However,
somebody has to do it and why not let that somebody be us?
We're masochists deep down I guess, here at HotHardware.
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Overclocking The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra |
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Coolbits making it hot... |
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Coolbits Registry Tweak
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Overclocking Results
4X AA and 8X Anisotropic Filtering Enabled
We'll take
another 12% gain with full stability any day of the week.
As you can see, we were able to overclock the core GPU
nicely, 55MHz over spec and the memory 116MHz over its stock
speed. This was achieved without a single lock up or
image artifact during an hour long testing loop. We're
not sure if this is indicative of retail product
capabilities but it certainly is promising.
Final Analysis
Now that we've
shown you all the intricate details, with regards to image
quality and benchmarks, what can we say about NVIDIA's new
baby? Well, we have to be careful here. At $499
ESP we can be fairly tough critics. At this price tag,
we want our AA as crisp if not crisper than anything else on
the market. However, it seems NVIDIA's current
Anti-Aliasing quality is slightly less sharp than ATi's,
depending on the setting. In addition, we would want
Aniso Filtering nearly for free but as we've seen in more
stressful testing, NVIDIA's GPU takes a more sizeable hit
than ATi's Radeon 9800, although it manages to keep the lead
in most tests. Again, a new set of drivers could
change the picture completely and literally. Also
remember, we tested the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, which will
retail for $499, versus an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, which
retails for $399, a 256MB card versus a 128MB card.
Will users realize a return on their investment of that
extra $100? That's a tough call. We're very
interested in seeing what speeds and feeds NVIDIA will run
on their $399 128MB GeForce FX 5900 (non Ultra) card.
If NV keeps the clocks speeds up and just de-pops the memory
down to 128MB, the 5900 "standard" could be a real looker.
All told, the
NV35 is a very competitive product that surpassed ATi's
current high end offering by a significant margin, in almost
every test we ran. We'll be coming back to a side by
side with the 256MB R9800 card but all indications are that
the extra 128MB of lower latency memory didn't buy the new
Radeon 9800 Pro all that much. For now, we're
impressed with the potential the NV35 has to offer. If
NVIDIA's excellent track record for driver optimizations
holds true, we'll see incremental performance increases in
the near future for the NV35 and hopefully they'll tighten
up that AA a bit too. With a few board OEMs growing
their own cooling solutions, things could get really
exciting for the NV35 and it's various flavors, this summer.
The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is officially slated to hit volume
in June. ATi is now talking openly about a "Summer
refresh" with their high end R350 products, so we'll have to
see how the chips fall then. However for now, NVIDIA
has taken back the raw performance lead in the high end PC
Graphic arena. Welcome back NVIDIA; let the games
begin.
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