With the "GT" moniker attached to the Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT's name we had a hunch that the card would be a good overclocker. With no hardware features separating itself from other GeForceFX 5950 Ultra's, there must be a reason why the card is called the "Performance Edition" by Gigabyte.

Starting with the core overclocking first, we immediately raised the clock speed from 520 MHz (default) to a nice round 500 MHz. Not too surprisingly the card did that speed without even flinching. After we slowly raised the speed in 5-7 MHz intervals, 545 MHz came and went easily as did 550 MHz. Finally, the GV-N595U-GT settled on a very nice top speed of 578 MHz!

Good speed to be sure, but memory overclocking is where the Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT really comes into its own. Starting at 950 MHz, the 2ns Hynix BGA DDR RAM had no problems hitting 1000 MHz. In fact it reached 1.1 GHz memory speed with no artifacts by the time we were done. Impressive results from the 'GT' edition, but the question still remains, "how with overclocked memory and core work together?"

Unfortunately we did not have much success running the core and memory at their maximum overclocked speed together...

In the end we had to lower the speeds to 559 MHz (core) and 1.07 GHz (memory) in order to complete the benchmarks properly. Still that's an awesome overclock from the Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT!

Benchmarks and 3DMark03

We've been a supporter of FutureMark since the days of 3DMark99, but for the time being we have stopped including 3DMark03 in Videocard benchmark suite. It has become clear that recent events have cast so much doubt in the legitimacy of 3DMark03 results that it no longer serves much reference value to our readers. We are aware of FutureMark's Approved Drivers list , but they can be somewhat limiting if newer WHQL drivers are available on the web. If the situation changes we will re-evaluate our position, and reintroduce the benchmark as decided. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us by e-mail or speak your mind in the PCstats forums.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt msi fx5950 ultra-vtd256 msi fx5900u-vtd256 msi fx5900xt-vtd128 gigabyte gv-nv57u128d gigabyte gv-n595u-gt memory: 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed cdrom: nec 52x cd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.02.1012 catalyst 3.9 detonator 53.03 workstation benchmarks 3dmark2001se codecreatures aquamark aquamark3 gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se x2 the threat ut2003