Setup

Massman's 3D on LN2 setup
CPU	Intel Core i5 750
Cooling	Cooler Master V8 KingpinCooling NB-1 LN2 container
Mainboard	Gigabyte P55-UD6
Videocard	LeadTek Winfast GT220 1GB
Memory	2x 2GB OCZ Platinum
Storage	Western Digital 250GB
Chassis	Cooler Master Lab Test Bench
PSU	Antec TruePower 1KW

Performance scaling

Before we start the actual extreme overclocking, it's important to find out what gives us the biggest increase in performance. Therefore, I removed the stock cooling of the card, switched to a more performing Zalman GPU Cooler sample, increase the voltage just a bit and started testing the frequencies using the 3DMark2001SE Nature subtest as reference benchmark. Although this benchmark is already 8, almost 9, years old, the Nature subtest still gives a good impression of the performance of a video card. Note that you could in fact use any benchmark to test scaling; as long as the difference in performance is significant enough, all that matters is the difference itself. Not the actual FPS.

First up, GPU scaling. This includes increasing the core frequency and the shader frequency, which is linked to the core.



As you can see, a significant increase of the core/shader frequency is, well, almost redundant. The performance doesn't really increase and what we feared from the beginning (low-end card thus memory bottlenecked) may very well be true.

Let's have a look at the memory overclocking performance scaling.



And, yes, our assumption turned out to be correct. This card is so heavily stripped from all of its features (48 shaders, 2 rops, 128-bit memory) that the real bottleneck has been re-located to the memory rather than the core. A pity, because this means that we will need a lot of luck to have well-clocking memory. On the previous page, you already saw that the memory isn't really high-end.

Let's hope for the best and go on to the overclocking results ->