ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe - Page 19

GPU Overclocking

No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technological demands the ever so popular games impose. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward to a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the times the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

The default speeds for the Asus Extreme N6600GT are 515MHz for both the core and the memory clock. In order to overclock the card, we used NVidia's NTune utility and Rivatuner V2.0 RC 15.3 New Year Edition.

Our goal was to find the maximum values for the two clocks where the card would still be able to handle the graphics load without overheating to the point of becoming unstable. Through trial and error for each clock, the final stable settings we derived are 550MHz for the GPU and 600MHz for the memory clock.

Let's see how much of a difference in performance 35MHz for the core and 85Mhz on the memory would yield:

Unfortunately, when the two ASUS Extreme N6600GT graphic cards are combined, overclocking potential is reduced. In Half Life 2, we only got a boost of 3fps. Same deal with Doom3 timedemo. In Far Cry, we got 5fps gain at 1024x768 resolution, while we could only gain 2fps at 1600x1200.