NVIDIA GeForce 6800

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 - Page 12
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, July 09, 2004, 05:00 PM EDT

Overclocking the GeForce 6800

Pushing The Limits

Considering that NVIDIA is able to crank the NV40 to 450MHz on the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, and the GeForce 6800 has fewer pixel pipelines activated, we expected the 6800's core to overclock fairly well. However, we also thought the on-board DDR1 memory and trimmed down power array would hold the card back a bit. In any event, we enabled CoolBits and overclocked the GeForce 6800 in an effort to boost performance...

When all was said and done, we were able to take our GeForce 6800's core up to an impressive 396MHz, an increase of 71MHz, or 21.8%, over the stock speed of 325MHz! Our cards memory also overclocked well, hitting a maximum speed of 819MHz DDR, a full 119MHz over stock. With the card overclocked, we re-ran a few of high-resolution tests with anti-aliasing and 8X Anisotropic enabled and saw some nice performance gains. At 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 8X Aniso, the GeForce 6800's performance went up 18.1% while overclocked, and it's framerate jumped 15.8% in Comanche 4 at the same configuration.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, force, 680, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com