With such an impressive cooling solution I had some pretty high hopes in terms of overclocking. Unfortunately the test sample had other ideas. Clocked at 300 MHz core and 650 MHz memory, I began to raise the core speed slowly, 5 MHz at a time. 305MHz, 310MHz, 315MHz and no problems. At around 321 MHz core speed the system would become unstable though.

We were hoping that the memory would be more up to the overclocking game, but it certainly was not cooperating. At first the card would only do about 701 MHz without artifacts, but as time went by artifacts started to appear. We first lowered the memory speed to 696 MHz then finally 691 MHz. Was it possible that the extra cooling was in fact acting more like an insulator?

After removing the stock "TOP Tech cooler" (both front and back plates) I replaced it with the GPU cooler found on the Albatron GeForce4 Ti cards, and left the BGA memory naked. No dice - this change did not allow us to overclock any higher, but it my just be that the card we tested was not up to the game when it came to overclocking.

pcstats test system specs:
computer hardware:
processor:	intel pentium 4 2.8 ghz
clock speed:	21 x 133 mhz
motherboards:	msi gnb max-fisr*
chipset:	intel e7205
videocard:	ati radeon 9700 pro (325/620) msi g4ti4600-td (300/650) albatron ti4800se (275/550) msi g4ti4600-vt2d8x (300/650) msi g4ti4600-vt2d8x (321/691)
memory:	2x 256mb corsair xms3500 cas2
hard drive:	20gb maxtor diamondmax+
cdrom:	nec 52x cd-rom
floppy:	panasonic 1.44mb floppy drive
heatsink:	avc sunflower
powersupply:	vantec 470w psu
software setup:	windowsxp intel inf's 4.10.1012 Catalyst 2.5 Detonator 41.09
Benchmarks:	3DMark2001SE AquaMark CodeCreatures Commanche 4 Quake III Arena Ver 1.17 UT2003 SPECviewperf AA Test, AF and AA+AF Test 3DMark2001SE Quake III Arena