Overclocking tests
ATi's move on to a 0.13-micron manufacturing process has allowed it to raise the core speed to a heady 400MHz, all with a simple, quiet cooler and fan combination. Tyan's excellent Tachyon Graphics Monitor gives the user easy access to the card's frequencies. 3DMark 2001SE's Nature test was rerun with 4x FSAA and 8x AF applied. The idea was to get the core nice and toasty. Fan speed was set to maximum and the VPU's frequency was increased until it could no longer complete 3 back-to-back tests without showing any form of artifacting. The same method of overclocking was applied to the memory frequencies. Here's how it all panned out.
A wholly impressive 135MHz extra VPU speed with utter stability, but only another 12MHz on the memory before it began to show the odd artifact. That's surprising and worrying in equal measure. Hynix 3.6ns RAM is used, RAM with a native frequency of 'only' 555MHz. If all G9600 Pro samples have the same memory traits, we'd be a little worried that the card may cause screen corruption at the default 600MHz speeds.
The overclocked Tyan was subjected to three benchmarks, all at 1024x768x32 4x AA / 8x AF. We wanted to see how an extra 30%+ core speed would translate into improved performance. Firstly, 3DMark 2001SE
Still falls behind the stock FX 5600 Ultra in this benchmark.
The overclocked G9600 Pro, running at 435/612, just nips in ahead of the FX 5600 Ultra. That's nice to see, especially if you're an ATi supporter.
Ahead again. We now wonder what a 535/700 9600 Pro would do. It's obviously a little bandwidth starved with only 612MHz memory speed.
