Overclocking

Running in 2D mode the cards' clock speeds are 275 MHz for the core and 1000 MHz for the memory. When switching to 3D mode, the core speeds raises itself to 400 MHz.

The latest version of Rivatuner allows you to change clock speeds of each mode.



Rivatuner also enables nVidia’s own coolbits, which is an overclocking tool accessible through the properties panel of the video card. It allows you to either set clock speeds manually or let the system find the best settings for you. Coolbits came up with this result:


ignore the Dutch context text please :-)

That’s an increase of ~15% on the core and 12 % on the memory. After looping 3DMark05 several times these settings seemed stable and gave no visual errors. But during gaming sessions in Far Cry got saw some visual glitches, so we lowered the clock speed of both CPU and Memory which solved this, and 450/1100Mhz gave excellent performance and stability! At these speeds the GPU is running faster than a 7800GTX.


7800GTX GPU: 430Mhz / Memory: 1200Mhz

To find out if the overclocked Club3D 7800GT is a match for the 7800GTX we will compare them head 2 head.

During testing the card never reached cricitual temperatures so the stock cooling is more than sufficient to allow overclocking safely. At default speeds the core registered 51°C, while overclocked it rose to only 53°C !


Video-In

After we sorted out an issue with the WDM driver, which refused to install on one of our Windows installations, we got the Video-In working. The picture quality is quite good for an integrated module and it gives the 7800GT from Club3D an extra boost in value as this VIVO function will come in handy. Before you can say “elchupenibre” we were playing the latest PS2 game “Pro Evolution Soccer 5” on our PC, through Video-In.


This screen capture does not really do justice to the actual image quality


It’s time to see how this card performs in our game benchmarks, so on we go ->