As with most enthusiasts, we were very curious as to how well the XFX 7950GT, with its passive cooling, would overclock. With stock settings, the XFX 7950GT runs at 550MHz core and 700MHz memory clock:

Using coolbits registry "hack" we enabled the overclocking features on Nvidia's control panel. Next step was to start playing around, trial and error method, raising the frequency, running 3D Mark 06 to stress the the VGA card until we had a stable state. Our best trials reached 601MHz core and 804 MHz memory, a 9.27% (core) and 14.29% (memory) improvement:

Usually, overclocking does affect gaming experience, but we had to find out by how much exactly:

Looking at the results, the performance differences are not high (6.81% for 3DMark06, 2.38% for Prey and 11.07% for COH). Perhaps with an active cooling solution, we could get better overclocking... Lastly, the GPU runs hot enough when at idle, reaching 60°C, while at full load, tops 82°C.