Overclocking Performance:

It is always our goal to try to overclock the low-end cards from a high-end, and rather respectable family of products, to determine the market standpoint. Manufacturers usually have the tendency to use the same chips (memory), but lock the specifications at a certain point to differentiate between its high-end and low-end product lineups. This commonly means that users will most like achieve above standard overclocks while being limited to the inferior architecture of low-end product lineup.

Like the majority of the 6800 vanilla cards we have tested thus far, all them have overclocked to 25 percent higher speeds than their set clock speeds. The reason for this is the use of identical chips from one manufacturer to another. The only difference between one card to another is its brand, package value, and something unique that one manufacturer does to gain lead from its competition. In this case, blue LED fans and a unique cooling solution.

During our overclocking tests, we determine the clock speeds of our DRAM and GPU one by one. This ensures that we secure the maximum overclock possible in the end. Our overclocking utility of choice is Powerstrip and we test our final overclocking results with rigorous game demos to make sure that the card can properly render the images and does not lock-up after increased temperatures or unstable speeds.

The highest speeds we achieved were standard to the other 6800 vanilla cards, around 885 MHz for DRAM and 407MHz for GPU. There were a few image rendering issues at these speeds, so we decided to lower them a bit. Finally, we were glad to see the card perform at 880MHz and 405MHz flawlessly.

This is a 25.2 percent increase in GPU speeds at NVIDIA recommended speeds and a 16.3 percent increase at BFGTech?s OC speeds (350MHz as opposed to 325MHz). They have set the DRAM speeds at default settings to 700MHz. We managed to overclock the DRAM by 25.7 percent higher than their stock settings.

Undoubtedly, BFGTech?s heatsink can effortlessly support maximum overclocking potential of the card, and the components on the cards are flexible enough to allow such results. Despite the already overclocked card, we managed to acquire even more performance from it. Overall, BFGTech flies through this stage.