NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90
Overclocking the GeForce 7950 GX2
As we neared the end of our testing, we spent a little time overclocking the new GeForce 7950 GX2 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. Please note that the GX2's GPU have to be overclocked in tandem, and not individually. The peak clock speed attainable by the "slower" of the two GPUs will determine the maximum overclock.
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XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 Overclocked: 585MHz GPU / 812MHz Memory
XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 Stock: 570MHz GPU / 775MHz Memory
Reference GeForce 7950 GX2: 500MHz GPU / 600MHz Memory
XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 Overclocked: 585MHz GPU / 812MHz Memory
XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 Stock: 570MHz GPU / 775MHz Memory
Reference GeForce 7950 GX2: 500MHz GPU / 600MHz Memory
Considering the fact that XFX's GeForce 7950 GX2, or more specifically the 570M XXX Edition that we've tested here, is pre-overclocked at the factory, we weren't expecting it to have much more headroom left for overclocking. Just to reiterate, NVIDIA's reference specifications call for 500MHz GPU clock speeds with 600MHz memory and XFX configures their card with its GPUs clocked at 570MHz and its memory at 775MHz. By overclocking the card, however, we were able to take it up to 585MHz for the GPUs and 812MHz for the memory. That was only an increase of 15MHz for the GPUs over XFX's "out-of-box" specifications, but the memory shot up by an additional 37MHz.
While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of benchmarks and gained a few points in 3DMark06 and a couple of frames per second in our custom Quake 4 test. The increases weren't enough to catch a GeForce 7900 GTX SLI configuration, but that hardly matters when the GeForce 7950 GX2's performance is as high as it is.
