There is always a way to improve the performance of your system by overclocking it. We were curious to see if the card could handle even higher clock frequencies. Using coolbits registry "hack", we enabled the overclocking features in Nvidia's control panel. We tried Ntune to find the optimal performance, but the system was halted every time we tried.

Our next attempts were with RivaTuner v2.00 Final, which was a success. Overclocking was selectable! Next step was the trial and error process, raising the frequency, running 3D Mark06 to stress test the VGA card and seeing if we had a stable system. Our best trials are shown below, including the stock clock frequencies for comparison:

The Gainward 8800GTX proved to be overclockable but only with a 7.83% improvement for the GPU core and 11.11% for the memory. After setting the highest possible clocks, we re-ran a few tests to see if performance improved at all.

3D Mark05 and 3D Mark 06 are affected by the increase in GPU and Memory clocks, but only by a small margin. We don't think that users will gain much from overclocking the Gainward 8800GTX. On the other hand, the 8800GTS seems to benefit more from overclocking, as the above results showed.