NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: XFX Style
Overclocking the 7800 GT
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As we neared the end of our testing, we spent a little time overclocking the XFX GeForce 7800 GT using the clock frequency slider available within NVIDIA's Forceware drivers, after enabling the "Coolbits" registry tweak. 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...
XFX GeForce 7800 GT: Stock=450MHz/1.05GHz | Overclocked=490MHz/1.11GHz
XFX GeForce 7800 GT: Stock=450MHz/1.05GHz | Overclocked=490MHz/1.11GHz
As we mentioned earlier, NVIDIA's reference specifications recommended the GeForce 7800 GT be clocked at 400MHz (core) and 1.0GHz (memory). XFX's card though, has its core clocked at 450MHz though, with its memory clocked at 1.05GHz. With clock speeds so much higher than the reference spec, we weren't expecting the XFX GeForce 7800 GT to overclock much higher, but we were able to crank things up by a decent amount. When we were done with the process, we were able to take the XFX GeForce 7800 GT's core all the way up to 490MHz and its memory peaked at 1.11GHz.
While the card was overclocked, we re-ran the default 3DMark05 test and our custom Doom 3 benchmark at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled. The end result was a 280 point boost in the XFX GeForce 7800 GT's 3DMark05 score, and 2.2FPS jump in Doom 3 performance.
