15 - Overclocking

No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technological demands the ever so popular games impose. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward to a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the times the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

The clocks of the NX6800 Ultra tick at 400MHz for the 6800 core and 550MHz (1100MHz effective) for the memory. The clocks are already set at a high speed so we didn't expect much framerate gain from overclocking it any further.

Sadly, the MSI card seemed to be already at its limits and even though we tried different combinations of clock speeds, the card was extremely unstable.

Finally, we managed to set the clocks at 415MHz for the core and 560MHz for the memory. However the results in benchmarks were quite unsatisfactory. Even though we double checked to avoid being mistaken, the following was sad but true:

• The NX 6800 Ultra's average performance gain from overclocking was less than 1fps and far from noticeable. Increasing the clocks further would either cause the testing to fail or the computer to freeze up.