First Impressions and Overclocking

A look at the cards

3D Prophet DDR-DVI

The back

DDR reference board

DDR reference back

Like most other GeForce 256 cards on the market, our 3D Prophet DDR-DVI features the same design as NVIDIA's reference board. Yep, that's right, the same basic design and layout, including the now familiar slimline heatsink and fan. We're sure many of you will have the stock heatsink and fan off in no time, (Thanks for the link GX-Deltan!) but we would have liked to have seen Guillemot go the extra mile here and offer a cooling solution with a little more kick.

Since the Dynamite DDR-DVI runs fine at its default clock speed and many hardcore consumers will probably swap out the cooling setup regardless of its quality, Guillemot must have felt extra cooling wasn't worth the added cost and potential power issues. Since many a successful overclock is often dependent on the quality of the chip itself this isn't a major issue.

The memory

As you can see, our evaluation unit shipped with 32MB of Infineon 6ns DDR SGRAM. This is the same type of memory that came with our ASUS V6800 Pure.

Overclocking

Over the past few months, we've tested a lot of GeForce boards. For instance, our original GeForce 256 reference board from NVIDIA wasn't much of an overclocker, only running the core stable up to 125MHz. In our first official GeForce review, the 3D Prophet (SDRAM) was only able to clock up to 130MHz core speed. Up to date, our fastest card had been the Elsa Erazor X, clocking in at 150MHz core and 183MHz memory.

Knowing this, we enthusiastically began our overclocking tests, eager to see how high our 3D Prophet DDR would go. Since the overclocking slider runs up to a very generous 380MHz memory and 160MHz core, we knew we'd have to start off with something easier, like the 150 core/183 memory our Elsa board ran at. (which is actually an impressive feat in itself)

As testing went on and the card continued to run stable, we found ourselves clocking the card higher and higher. By the time overclocking tests were complete, our 3D Prophet DDR-DVI clocked to 160MHz core/360MHz memory! Did Guillemot slip us a golden sample? If so, thanks, we appreciate it!

Overclocking slider

We've included overclocked scores for your viewing pleasure and to prove the card was actually stable at that astronomical speed. In fact, the system was left on with the overclocked Prophet DDR overnight, and upon return the next day the benchmarks were run.