Taking a look to see how far we can push the overclock, we find ourselves firing up our trusty friend; MSI AfterBurner and immediately seeing how far we can push the GPU core clock speed from its already pre-overclocked state. With new technologies from Nvidia, overclocking is even easier and we are hoping to see some good results from this card, based on the temperatures and power delivery that we saw in the charts on the previous pages.
From the initial 1150MHz speed that the card shipped with, we were able to push it even further to 1225MHz giving us a 6.5% increase and without stopping there, we also focussed heavily on the memory speed, taking it from its stock speed of 1753MHz up to an amazing 1990MHz resulting in a 13.5% increase and an effective speed of 7.96Gbps. To say that these figures are nothing short of amazing is an understatement to say the least. The cooler has certainly helped us to get these figures today.
With these overclocks in place, it was time to fire 3DMark 11 back up to see how the score was affected, if at all. With an initial score of 3906, the overclock that we applied allowed us to get a 3DMark Extreme score of 4185, showing a 7.14% increase thanks to a small amount of tweaking within our chosen overclocking software.
Beautiful looking!
I haven’t seen a Gainward product for donkey years now, I almost forgot they existed.
Gainward are actually one of the biggest brands in the entire market as they are a joint brand with Palit – http://www.eteknix.com/asus-knocked-off-top-graphics-card-vendor-pedestal-by-palit-and-pc-partner/
So I believe. Their graphics cards were a very common sight here years ago, now we only see them sporadically at some e-tailers unlike the big names such as Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI & Asus which you can practically pick up at you local barber shop.
You have never seen a Gainward card? They have been around for ages and are always very good. Find this hard to believe!
I haven’t either there not sold in certain countries that’s why. I can fin most other brands easily except theirs..
Oh, God! Thank you eTeknix! I finally decide, what video card I need and want.
What do you mean by “Stock Memory Speeds” as a con? Is it lower than others?
Good review, thanks! I’ve never seen that brand here in the US.
My Phantom in the games goes to 2000rpm+ its normal?
Hey.. you clocked it, yes .. but, what is the temps saing, when you play the game ??
I discussed about the phantom on the msi twinfrozr page. I bought it a couple of weeks ago, and it is an awesome card. The phantom is really silent up until the 40% fan use. From then, it is as audible as my cpu fan when put at 2500rpm. Starting from 60-70%, you start to really hear it, but it’s still nothing compared to other cards or when you insert a CD.
As for overclocking, i managed with air cooling to push it to 1,190Mhz of clock, and 1,773 Mhz of memory
, which is close to what @RyanTheGerman:disqus expected of it, so either i’m a second silicon lottery lucky, or the card is really good. With 100% fan speed, on 3Dmark Vantage demostration (performance) bench, i never get above 64C°. (The score? between 37998 and 39374 for GPU). One weird thing, checking with afterburner, i notice that i never reach 100% GPU usage…? So i still have room for improvement, but i suck at OC so i’ll keep it at that 😛
Thanks again Ryan for your advices, and hope my post will help!