Sidney

WHEN NVIDIA launched GeForce 7800GTX and touted its immediate availability, high yield was also thanked to manufacturing process which used some well-known techniques from wonderful world of mobile GPU's (like clock gating), nobody took some other mobile techniques into the account, like various parts of the same chip working at different frequencies, or constant clock speed change.
Our friends Hilbert from Guru3D and legendary Unwinder discovered a certain "issue" with the G70. When you run a 3D app, GPU clock will raise from default’s 430 to 468 MHz, while RAM clock will remain the same. This "feature" is currently named "Geometry Clock Delta", and has something to do with the complex pipeline nV pulled out with G70 (as you probably know, it is getting ever harder to talk about "pipes", when in fact everything is programmable, and G70 is consisted out of eight Vertex Shader units, 24 pixel units and 16 rasterising operations units (ROP’s).

Green Goblin spinners responded with an quick update, but we have yet to see that "update" applied to retail boxes of manufacturers who claim their product work at 470 MHz (hiding that under "Geometric Clock Delta"), which puts true overclocking manufacturers in awkward position (BFG OC Series, Gainward Golden Sample).

Gainward also isn't stating it's clock speeds yet, but water-cooled CoolFX 7800GTX works at 500 MHz and beyond with no real problems whatsoever. Add 40 MHz, and you’ll easy find a marketing modus operandi in which Gainward could claim GPU clock speed faster than PlayStation 3 (530+40 MHz = 570 MHz, RSX = 550 MHz).

Sadly, don’t expect upcoming mainstream monster-baby GeForce 7600 (G72) to be simpler than 7800, so you can expect even more marketing confusion in cut-throating mainstream arena.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=24409

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lazyman

Opteron 165 (2) @2.85 1.42 vcore AMD Stock HSF + Chill Vent II