Wow, that title is a mouthful. Anyway, I was bored and decided to find out what my graphics card could handle. First off I needed to find out exactly what it was running at in terms of clock speed and memory speed. To do this I installed Gainward’s eXperTool, a utility that came with my card but that I had neglected until now. After updating it to the most current version and updating the bios of the board I checked the clock speed. My card was set at the factory default 300 Mhz core and 650 Mhz memory. From here I decided I needed to benchmark the card before attempting to overclock it. I ran 3DMark by MadOnion and got a respectable score of 8933. It should be mentioned at this point that I’m using Nvidia’s Detonator 41.09 drivers for this. I know that the 42.xx drivers are out there somewhere but I didn’t want to try this on beta driver for fear of something going wrong. So, after the first round of testing I decided to crank the card up to “Enhanced Mode” which is an actual setting in eXperTools especially designed for overclocking. This bumped the clock speed to 310 Mhz and the Memory to 680 Mhz. A successful completion of 3DMark again and I received quite a serious bump in results. The card tested at 9648 (up from 8933). I was quite pleases with this since I had significantly improved my cards proformance while not seriously overclocking it. I decided to chance it and go for the glory. I pushed the card past the recommended “enhanced mode” limits and jumped the clock speed up to 320 Mhz and the memory to 700 Mhz. To my amazement the card remained stable through another round of testing. It produced a score of 9982 from 3DMark. Quite pleased with myself at this point I returned the card settings to “enhanced mode” and that’s where I’ve decided it shall stay. There’s no reason to push it any further when I don’t have to. Anyway, to wrap up my hap-hazard results, here’s a little list:

Safe Mode (300Mhz clock speed) – 3DMark Score: 8933
Enhanced Mode (310Mhz clock speed) – 3DMark Score: 9648
Overclocked (320Mhz clock speed) – 3DMark Score: 9982

Now, I need to point out that this is without anti-aliasing turned on. This is purely hardware here. I’m planning on running seperate 2xAA and 4xAA benchmarks tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Matt out.