Overclocking

Notes

Once overclocked, the GeForce 8800 GTS is one helluva graphics card. We overclocked our BFG board to 620MHz core/907MHz memory. We actually hit higher speeds but had to lay off for the board to run completely stable.

The GeForce 8800 GTX board on the other hand didn't scale quite as far, and thus we didn't include those scores on this page. It topped out at 622MHz core/920MHz memory, so 2MHz faster than the BFG card on the core and 13MHz higher on the memory.

Currently NVIDIA's nTune utility only supports graphics core overclocking (although the shader processors are also OC'ed when you overclock the graphics core), but with future versions of the utility NVIDIA is hoping to add the ability to support independent clocks for the shader and graphics cores. We honestly can't wait to see that feature once it's implemented!

UPDATE: We've received quite a few emails asking how the overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS is able to match the stock GTX in performance, so we'll provide a few theories here. Most importantly, keep in mind that we're dealing with very early drivers, and we're still barely seeing the potential of the GeForce 8800 GTX. The bottom line is that the 8800 GTX has more performance headroom than the GTS, but perhaps we're not seeing that today due to its early drivers. Another possibility is that the games we're testing aren't demanding enough to really push the G80's new shader architecture, so once the GeForce 8800 GTS is clocked higher it's able to deliver performance comparable, if not slightly better than the stock 8800 GTS.