Because of set spacing between the FX GPU and the aluminum Wisefan heatsink, we made sure to apply some good non-silicon thermal compound to either side of the fallen heatspreader and replace it before continuing on with our tests.

With the core speed clocked at 475 MHz at default (25 MHz up from the 5900 Ultra) we didn't really know how much more headroom was in the card. Going up 5 MHz at a time we were easily able to pass the 500 MHz mark which was very nice and we even passed the 525 MHz mark! The core would amazingly do well past 575 MHz with no artifacts but we'd get weird performance pauses, I think the thermal throttling feature was kicking which is native to all nVIDIA FX videocards. Its purpose is to save the core from possible heat damage. In the end we were able to run through the benchmarks at 550 MHz core speed.

In theory the 2ns Hynix memory should reach at least 500 MHz, but of course there's more to overclocking than the rated memory speed. With the memory clocked at 475 MHz DDR (or 950 MHz SDR) by default, we raised the speed up 10 MHz at a time and in the end it bottomed out at 500 MHz (or 1 GHz SDR) before artifacts started appearing.

The Albatron GeForceFX 5950 UV's core and memory did play quite nicely together and we didn't have to lower either in order to get the card to run stably.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt gigabyte radeon 9600 pro msi fx5900u-vtd256 albatron geforcefx 5600 ultra (rev2) msi g4ti4600-vt2d8x albatron geforcefx 5950 uv memory: 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed cdrom: nec 52x cd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.03 catalyst 3.9 detonator 52.16 workstation benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark03 aquamark aquamark3 codecreatures gun metal 2 quake iii arena ver 1.17 ut2003 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se quake iii arena