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 time the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

The XFX 6800GS XXX comes already stock overclocked. The default running frequencies for the 6800GS card is 425MHz core clock and 500MHz memory clock. But the default core and memory clock for the XFX 6800GS XXX Edition are set to 485MHz and 1.10GHz respectively.

We ran some tests to see how far we can go with this card, and we managed to get a stable system running at 544MHz core clock and 1.22GHz memory clock. This might not seem like much, considering the default frequencies for this card (485MHz/1.10GHz), but they are when we look at nVidia's suggested clock frequencies.

During gaming, the card gave us only 57°C while overclocking with no artifacts or screen distortions of any kind, while when idle, the temperature level was 41°C. This means that you don't need to worry about temperatures when overclocking the XFX 6800GS XXX. The fan will do a great job when needed.

Let's see if we achieved a difference in performance.

We got a maximum difference of 7fps with FarCry and 9fps with Half Life 2, which is great.