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| The Overclocking the GeForce 6600 GT |
| Going beyond the norm... |
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The AGP version of NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT has been impressive up to this point. At 500MHz, the GPU was already the fastest of the three cards in our review, but of course we couldn't leave it at that. Using the Coolbits hack for the ForceWare drivers enabled us to raise the GPU and Memory speeds over the stock speeds set at the factory. We already knew we could get more out of the RAM, since our sample was set at 450 MHz (900MHz effective), but what returns could we get on the GPU? We got as high as 548 MHz, while topping out at 1040 MHz for the RAM. We then went back to two games and benchmarked them a second time at these higher speeds. Doom 3 ran without complaint, but we did see some very minor artifacting in AquaMark 3. Here's the results:
Raising the core speed by 10% (548MHz over 500MHz stock) gave out almost exactly what we put in. In other words, we got an 8-10% performance increase in these two benchmarks when the card was overclocked. Still, we did see some graphic corruption in Aquamark, so it probably would be best to cut back from 548MHz to achieve better stability. Are the dividends worth the trouble? We'll leave that up to the individual to decide, but it's always good to see that there's headroom to be had.
