Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked single card overclocked sli cards gpu (core) speed: 430 MHz 504 MHz 499 MHz Memory Speed: 1200 MHz 1371 MHz 1297 MHz If you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

We already know that the Geforce 7800GTX is one of the fastest videocards on the market, but that won't save the MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E from a hefty round of overclocking tests. ;-) We picked one card at random to overclock it in a standalone configuration before moving on to the SLI-mode overclocking tests.

Starting with that single MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E videocard we first increased the core slowly in ~5 MHz intervals with RivaTuner. 450, 460 and 470 MHz came and went by very easily and the core still had plenty of speed left in it. The nvdia G70 core even hit the 500 MHz plateau which was very nice. Unfortunately we did not get much higher than that, anything above 504 MHz and RivaTuner would complain about about the videocard failing its overclocking test.

Next came the videocard memory overclocking tests, and with a default clock of 1200 MHz, it is already pretty speedy. This time I was a bit impatient and increased the memory clock speed in ~20 MHz jumps. Kids, do not try this at home and if you will be overclocking, take smaller steps. ;-)

It seemed like the memory on the MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E did not want to be out done by the core and was very good at overclocking too. I will skip the boring details and just tell you that the memory easily hit 1371 MHz on the K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI test board. As with the core, anything higher and RivaTuner would complain about the videocard failing its tests.

The core and memory had no problems running at maximum overclocked speeds together which I am happy to report. Traditionally with nVIDIA cards, the core and memory do not operate well at each respective maximum speed.

Overclocking two videocards in SLI mode is obviously more difficult as one card will definitely be weaker than the second and the NX7800GTX-VT2D256E videocard in PCI Express x16 slot one will probably be running a little hotter. In any case I thought it would be fun to see the maximum speed of the two NX7800GTX-VT2D256E videocards running in SLI mode. I will not go into detail about how things went.... but in the end the core and memory played nicely together running at 499 MHz and 1297 MHz respectively under the limitations of SLI.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: amd athlon64 4000+ clock speed: 12 x 200 mhz = 2.4 ghz motherboards: msi k8n neo4 platinum sli (nf4-sli)* dfi lanparty nf4 sli-dr (nf4-sli) videocard: msi rx850xt-td256e msi rx800xt-vtd256e ati radeon x800 xl powercolor x700 pro powercolor bravo x700 geforce 7800 gtx sli albatron geforce 7800 gtx gigabyte gv-nx78x256v-b msi nx6800gt-t2d256e msi nx6800-td128e (single) msi nx6800-td128e (sli mode) gigabyte gv-3d1 (single mode) gigabyte gv-3d1 (sli mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (single mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (sli mode) msi nx6200tc-td32e msi nx7800gtx-vt2d256e (single mode)* msi nx7800gtx-vt2d256e (sli mode)* memory: 2x 512mb mushkin pc3200 l2 v2 hard drive: 74gb wd raptor 10k rpm sata hdd cdrom: aopen 52x combo powersupply: seasonic super tornado 400w heatsink: prometeia mach ii gt (review) Software Setup WindowsXP Build 2600 nForce Catalyst 5.7 Detonator 77.77 Benchmarks 3DMark2001SE 3DMark05 CodeCreatures Gun Metal 2 X2 The Threat UT2003 Doom3 AA Test, AF and AA+AF Test 3DMark2001SE UT2003

The AGP and PCI-Express systems use a different motherboard but results are shown for reference. Unfortunately there are no AquaMark3 numbers for this review, we could not get the benchmark working reliably.