MSI FX5950 Ultra - Page 16

Overclocking

The MSI FX5950 Ultra edition isn't much of an overclocker. It's not that we didn't get the clocks to run much faster, but the difference we got in Doom 3 and Far Cry benchmarks was not so great. Using RivaTuner, we pushed the core speed from 475MHz to 540MHz and the memory clock from 950MHz to 1.04GHz. Let's see the results:

Doom 3 got a boost of around 4 frames per second

Far Cry performance improved by 3fps.

I knew the memory would go beyond 1GHz but I had a false hope that suddenly the FX5950U would surprise us somehow by being a really good overclocker. Instead, whenever I set the clocks higher than 540MHz and 1.04GHz, the card would get unstable and lock up the system for some time (indicating a way too high core speed) or produce artifacts (too fast a memory clock).

I guess the flower-like heatsinks that are provided, do not do such a good job, other than keeping the card cool only at the predefined range of frequencies, which is fair enough. However, it makes up for it by being an ultra-quiet solution.We have to give credit to MSI for that. Even though the computer case that we ran our tests on was open all the time, we couldn't discern any noise at all coming from the AGP card.