The OCZ GeForce 8800 GTX Video Card Review

Overclocking

So far this review has been pretty hum drum. Our OCZ card runs like it should for clock speeds that it ships with. Overclocking however, is where this card puts the pedal to the metal and leaves the other cards in the dust.

Once again we turned to ATI Tool to handle overclocking our OCZ GeForce 8800 GTX. With the built in utility to stress test the video card as you crank up the speed it provides repeatable results. The shipping speeds for the card were 575MHz Core, 1350MHz shader clock, and 1.8GHz memory. Note that when you overclock the Core speed the shader speed increases as well. Keep in mind that I did not adjust the fan speed, nor was any extra cooling applied to the card.

Wow! We reached an incredible 650MHz core clock and 2.05GHz memory! At 650MHz core, the shader speed was at 1512MHz! We were able to run through all of our game tests at these new speeds and as you can see below the results were pretty impressive.

Rainbow Six: Vegas

F.E.A.R.

Our mild mannered card went from Clark Kent to Superman alright. Both tests show a great improvement over default speeds and something that you would notice in Rainbow Six: Vegas.

It must be noted that the core could overclock on its own to 670MHz but the card would begin to artifact when memory speed reached just 930MHz. On the other hand, the memory could reach 1070MHz when there was no overclock on the core. The speeds that I settled on may not be the best mix of performance but showed the highest stable speeds that could be reached when both were overclocked. With better cooling this card would no doubt be an overclockers dream, and at the speeds I reached runs much like an GeForce 8800 Ultra for $300 less!