Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked gpu (core) speed: 550 mhz 675 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

MSI has always excelled in videocard overclocking - maybe it's that shade of red they coat every motherboard and videocard with.... As the MSI NX7900GS-T2D512E-OC comes from the factory already pretty heavily overclocked, we're not expecting too much more from the GPU and memory. By default the GPU is clocked at 550 MHz, while the memory hums along at a brisk 1400 MHz.

Starting with the core first, PCSTATS relied on nVIDIA's nTune software to adjust the clock speed in ~7 MHz increments. We're aiming for anything above 600 MHz...

The MSI NX7900GS-T2D512E-OC had no problems bridging the 50 MHz gap and cracked 600 MHz. Nice. The 650 MHz mark came and went, just before the GeForce 7900GS core settled at a top speed of 675 MHz; nTune complained about failing its driver test for speeds past this. That's a pretty healthy overclock, so let's see how the 512MB of GDDR3 memory handles now.

By default the GDDR3 memory runs at 1400 MHz - already pretty fast. Starting at 1400 MHz the frequency was increased in ~10 MHz steps and without much difficulty we passed 1500 MHz, 1525 MHz, 1550 MHz, and 1600 MHz!

That was about as far as it went, for a few moments later the 512MB GDDR3 memory called "time" and fizzled out at an overclocked speed of 1612 MHz. Attempts at anything higher caused nTune to stop us dead in our tracks. The core and memory on the MSI NX7900GS-T2D512E-OC had no problem running together at their respective maximum overclocked speeds. MSI and overclocking go together so well!

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the MSI NX7900GS-T2D512E-OC 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 7900GS 512MB 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 FX-62 Clock Speed: 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz Motherboards: Asus M2-CROSSHAIR (NF 590 SLI) Videocard: MSI NX7900GS-T2D512E-OC Asus EAX1900XTX/2DHTV/512M/A Asus EAX1950PRO/HTDP/256M/A MSI NX8800GTX-T2D768E-HD Foxconn FV-N88SMCD2-ONOC MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE MSI NX7900GTX-T2D512E Gigabyte GV-NX76GT256D-RH Biostar Sigma-Gate GeForce 7600GS Memory: Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C3 Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 6.70 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 ATI Catalyst 7.2 Benchmarks: 3DMark05 3DMark06 FarCry Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Doom 3 Quake 4 FEAR AA+AF Benchmarks FarCry FEAR Doom 3