NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
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As we neared the end of our testing, we spent a little time overclocking the GeForce 6800 GS using the clock frequency slider available within NVIDIA's Forceware drivers after enabling "CoolBits". To find the card's peak core and memory frequencies, we slowly raised their respective sliders until we begun to see visual artifacts on-screen while running a game or benchmark or our test system became unstable...
To put it mildly, our particular GeForce 6800 GS sample turned out to be one heck of an overclocker. We were able to take our card up from its default 425MHz core clock speed all the way up to 540MHz, and were able to increase its 1.0GHz memory clock sup to 1.23GHz. Yes, that an 115MHz increase in core clock speed (27%) and a 230MHz increase in the memory clock (23%). And as you'd expect, pushing the core and memory clocks up by over 20% had a significant impact on performance. To demonstrate the benefits overclocking had on performance, we re-ran the default 3DMark05 benchmark and our custom Doom 3 benchmark at 1600x1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled. As you can see, our 3DMark05 score jumped by over 1200 points and Doom 3's framerate went up by 9.3 frames per second, an increase of about 25%. If this type of overclock turns out to be typical of all GeForce 6800 GS cards, we suspect there are some very happy budget overclockers in the world today...
