The built in thermal management system of the NV36 GPU make it a bit more difficult to find the maximum speed of the videocard. I can understand why nVIDIA has added it in, and while it doesn't make the enthusiasts life any easier, it is bound to save a few newbies from damaging their videocards accidentally.

Beginning at a core speed of 475 MHz, we slowly raised the GPU to the 520MHz mark, and were even able to even surpass 600 MHz ! It's nice to see that nVIDIA has its 0.13 micron manufacturing down! The maximum speed the core would reach was 619MHz while simply stock cooled.

The DDR-II memory was not about to be out done, but since it was already clocked at the maximum theoretical limit of 900 MHz, it was difficult to guess how much further it could be pushed. To our surprise the memory breezed past 1 GHz, and ultimately maxed out at a top speed of 1.02 GHz. Anything higher and the card would start to artifact.

The core and memory worked nicely together, and so we didn't have to change the 619MHz/1.02GHz overclock speeds to get the Albatron FX5700U to run through the upcoming benchmarks stably!

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 gigabyte radeon 9600 pro msi fx5900u-vtd256 albatron geforcefx 5600 ultra (rev2) msi g4ti4600-vt2d8x albatron geforcefx 5700 ultra 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 5.03 catalyst 3.9 detonator 52.16 workstation benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark03 aquamark aquamark3 codecreatures gun metal 2 quake iii arena ver 1.17 ut2003 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se quake iii arena