Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked gpu (core) speed: 560 mhz 628 mhz memory speed: 1400 mhz 1612 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

PCSTATS has seen in the past that nVIDIA GeForce 7600GT CPU lives up to the GeForce 6600GT's reputation of being an excellent overclocker, even on stock cooling.

With that in mind we knew we could be a bit more aggressive with the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH and still get away with it. Starting with the core first, the Geforce 7600GT clock speed was increased in 5-10 MHz increments in nTune 5 (from a stock speed of 560 MHz).

The GV-NX76T256D-RH's GeForce 7600GT core handled this kind of rapid overclocking well and easily cracked the 600 MHz (core) mark without breaking a sweat. The passive SilentPipe II heatsink did get very warm during testing, so underscore the part about maintain good internal case airflow.

We were only able to garner a few short moments of overclocking beyond this, as the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH's GeForce 7600GT core maxed out 628 MHz. Anything higher cause the system to lock up - the international sign of "no, you ain't overclocking me one Hertz more!" For a passively cooled videocard I think it is safe to say the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH did a decent job here.

Next on the agenda was the 256MB of GDDR3 videocard memory. Starting at 1400 MHz, we were a bit more aggressive with the memory in our overclocking and it quickly broached the 1500 MHz plateau. The Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH memory hit a maximum speed of 1612 MHz, before we gave up trying to coax higher speeds from it. To our pleasant surprise the GeForce 7600GT core and GDDR3 memory did not have any issues running together at their maximum speeds. Thus, all overclocked benchmarks will be run on the GV-NX76T256D-RH with a core speed of 628 MHz and memory speed of 1612 MHz. Team that up with an AMD Athlon64 4000+ and a 1GB set of OCZ Gold GX PC3500, and we have a pretty decent gaming system here.

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this nVidia GeForce 7600GT based videocard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next page.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system processor: amd Athlon64 4000+ (socket 939) Clock Speed: 12 x 200 MHz = 2.4 GHz Motherboards: Asus A8N-SLI Premium (NF4 SLI) Videocard: Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH Asus EAX1900XTX/2DHTV/512M/A MSI RX1800XT-VT2D512E Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B ATi Radeon X850 XT PE MSI RX800XT-VTD256E ATi Radeon X800 XL PowerColor X700 PRO MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE MSI NX7900GTX-T2D512E Asus EN7900GT TOP/2DHT/256M/A MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D512E MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E (Single Mode) MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E (SLI Mode) Asus EN7800GT 2DHTV/256M/OSP/A (Single Mode) Asus EN7800GT 2DHTV/256M/OSP/A (SLI Mode) MSI NX7600GT-VT2D256E MSI NX6800GT-T2D256E MSI NX6600GT-TD128E (Single Mode) MSI NX6600GT-TD128E (SLI Mode) Memory: 2x 512MB OCZ Gold GX PC3500 DDR Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 4000+ Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 6.70 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 ATI Catalyst 6.6 Benchmarks: 3DMark05 3DMark06 AquaMark3 FarCry Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Doom 3 FEAR Quake 4 X3: Reunion AA+AF Benchmarks FarCry FEAR Doom 3