Mainstream GeForce 8 Series Round-Up: MSI & Gigabyte
Overclocking
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Rounding out our testing, we tried our hand at some overclocking to see how each of these cards faired. Once the optimal settings were found, we ran our Quake 4 test once again to show what performance gains could be uncovered.
The GIGABYTE GeForce 8600GTS overclocked fairly well, managing to add 85MHz to the GPU clock and 84MHz to the memory. With a 12% gain in GPU speed and 8% gain in memory speed, we recorded performance increases of 10-11% at both resolutions. This brought the Gigabyte 8600GTS to the same performance level as the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. The MSI NX8600GT also posted decent results, tacking on 70MHz to the GPU speed and 50MHz to the memory speed. This resulted in a 12% boost in GPU clock speed and closer to 6% in memory speed. Overall performance improvements equalled 9%, adding 3-4 FPS to each resolution tested, falling just shy of the GeForce 8600GTS' stock scores. Finally, we wrapped things up with the MSI NX8500GT adding a whopping 242MHz to the GPU clockspeed and 13MHz to the memory speed. In the end, this resulted in performance gains of 2-4 FPS, which equalled 17% at 1280x1024 and 14% at 1600x1200.
