Overclocking
While performance is already strong at the default clock levels the XFX carries, the tweaks NVIDIA have made to the GPU and the accompanying electrical work done at the PCB and power level mean that there should be some extra headroom on top, even above what XFX think is sufficient.Using Coolbits, clocks were increased in linear fashion, 5MHz at a time on both GPU and memory (but not at the same time) to find the limits of both. When instability was detected, the clock level was backed off 1MHz at a time until good levels were found. Stability tests included a triplet of 3DMark05 runs and some Quake 4 timedemos. As always, the clocks found are only to be used as a guide, since each sample is different and the sample tested was specifically marked for press. While we don't believe XFX massaged the sample in any way, it can't be counted out. So just a guide to possible clocks folks, nothing more.
616MHz GPU and 1.79GHz memory are impressive enough. The extra performance from that worked out as follows.
Performance increases between 9 and 11.5% percent across the board, when made to work hard in Splinter Cell: CT, are as expected.