There is always a way to improve the performance of your system by overclocking it. All three cards are overclocked, compared with Nvidia's 7950GT reference board. No doubt, it would be even better if we could manage to overclock them even more. Using coolbits registry "hack", we enabled the overclocking features in Nvidia's control panel. Next step was to do our usual trial and error process, raising the frequency, running 3D Mark06 to stress test the VGA card and seeing if the system was stable or not. Our best trials are shown below, with the stock clock frequencies included for comparison:

The most overclockable card was the Gainward 7950GT, due to its very good cooling system and the different memory modules used. The EVGA 7950GT has good memory OC, while the XFX 7950GT Silent was the "lowest" performer in this test although it did provide the best relative increase in Core speed. Don't forget, that the XFX 7950GT has passive cooling that reduces overclocking potential. After setting the highest possible clocks, we ran a few tests to see if performance improves at all.

The 3D Mark05 overall score is greatly affected by overclocking. The EVGA 7950GT KO easily breaks the 11.000 points barrier, while, surprisingly, the XFX 7950GT shoots into second place with 10432. The Gainward 7950GT GS doesn't seem to increase its performance by all that much. In 3D Mark 06, we see exactly the same behaviour...

Passing on to real life gaming, the EVGA 7950GT and Gainward 7950GT are neck and neck, but the Gainward 7950GT GS had much better performance under Splinter Cell Chaos theory.

Concluding, we were hoping to see much better performance from the Gainward 7950GT, since it had the highest clocking frequencies for both memory and core. However, the performance increase was not as impressive as with the EVGA 7950GT KO or even the XFX 7950GT Silent. The only explanation we can give, is that the Gainward 7950GT uses Samsung memory modules, while both the EVGA and XFX 7950GT use Infineon memory modules.