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We recently got the chance to take
a look at Nvidia's latest graphics processor release, the FX5950 Ultra chip, as thoughtfully provided by
Gigabyte in their GV-N595U video card.
82% Rating: 
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Overclocking the GV-N595U Benchmarks
Due to
the thermal safeguard abilities of the FX59XX series GPUs, overclocking the
GV-N595U is a rather imprecise science. Instead of a linear progression of performance improvements,
continuing until you push the card too far and get artifacts or
lockups, the FX5950 tends to throttle itself back to protect itself when you
over stress it.
This is not to say that you cannot overclock the
card though; just that it requires a different kind of observation. When you
would otherwise be seeing the telltale signs that you have gone too far such as
artifacts, you will see nothing wrong but your benchmark scores will simply drop
instead.
As usual, the Coolbits utility enables overclocking
in the Nvidia control panel. In this section,
you may notice an 'automatic settings' button, which will actually overclock the
card for you, to a (generally slightly conservative) setting. Now I'm not sure
if it's the 52.16 drivers or not, but while this button seemed to work fine if
we started from the default clock settings, hitting it after manually
overclocking the card resulted in some extremely high settings, high enough to
lock up the card, thermal throttling or not.
Best to do things manually here then. After some
playing around, we settled on 516Mhz core, 1.02Ghz memory timings as being a
good stable platform to use for our overclocked benchmarks.
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| 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 9800 Pro
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
Gigabyte
Radeon 9600 Pro
MSI FX5900U-VTD256
Albatron GeForceFX 5600
Ultra (Rev2)
MSI G4Ti4600-VT2D8X
Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra |
| Memory: |
2x 256MB Corsair TwinX 3200LL |
| Hard Drive:
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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 | |
This new accurate diagnostic tool, designed for
DirectX9.0, provides you with all the information you need to make informed
hardware assessments. Havok Total real-time physics library from Havok - these
routines are used to accurately model the movements of objects due to forces,
etc. FMOD sound library from Firelight Technologies - these are used for the
various sound effects and routines used in the tests. Graphics adapter analysis
software from Powerstrip of Entech Taiwan - this is used to correctly determine
the speeds of the graphics processing and video memory chips, plus supply
additional hardware information. Higher 3DMark03 scores denote better
performance.
Since the 3.4.0 version of 3Dmark 2003 came out during
our testing of the card, we had a chance to benchmark with both versions.
As you probably already know, the newest build of Futuremark's synthetic benchmark considerably lowers the scores
that recent Nvidia cards achieve.
We saw this illustrated very clearly, as with both
overclocked and stock settings, the 5950 dropped ~900 3Dmarks with the new
build. Pre-patch, the 5950 actually managed to achieve an impressive 6980
3Dmarks, which dropped back to a more reasonable 6089 with the new version. At
stock, the FX5950 now comes in a little behind the older ATI 9800 Pro in this
benchmark, which hurts a little.
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3DMark03 Build
3.4.0
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