| Overclocking the Albatron PC6600U | Going beyond the norm... |
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The PC6600U has been a steady performer so far. At 400MHz, the Geforce 6600 GPU was already running faster than spec, so we weren't sure how much further we would be able to push it. Ditto for the memory speeds. Well, raising the clock speeds in the ForceWare drivers allowed us to clock the GPU as high as 521MHz, 121MHz over stock speed and 221MHz over a standard GeForce 6600 card. We had less success with the memory, where we could only manage a slight bump up to 743MHz. To check the effects of these speed boosts, we re-ran Doom 3 and AquaMark 3, both at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8x Aniso. Here's the results:
Raising the core speed by nearly 30% gave us some nice returns, although it still didn't help out the overall cause as much as we might have hoped. We were able to gain over three frames per second with each benchmark, equalling a 19% increase in Aquamark 3 and a more paltable 29% boost in Doom 3 frame rates. As you can see in the Aquamark 3 graph, the extra performance still placed the PC6600U four and a half frames per second behind the X700 Pro. In Doom 3 at least, the overclocked PC6600U managed to overtake the other card.