X-bit labs

eVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and PowerColor RADEON 9800 XT: Extreme Overclocking and More! (page 2)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 01/04/2004 | 09:43 PM ]

Special units integrated into the GPU are responsible for supplying analog signal to the D-Sub and DVI-I outputs as well as shaping low-frequency TV signal for the video-out. The Sil164ct64 chip from Silicon Image outputs digital signal to the DVI, and the SAA7108 chip from Philips decodes video signal from the video-in:

The set of accompanying accessories includes a DVI-I-to-D-Sub adapter, an S-Video cable and an adapter cable from the composite video-in/video-out to two RCA and two S-Video connectors:

We’ve also got a user’s manual and a pile of CDs with games and software, where we should definitely point out full versions of Ghost Recon and America’s Army games and the excusive pack from EVGA called Automated Driver Management (ADM). The ADM tool makes it very easy for a beginner to install the drivers for the card and complement them with chipset and AGP drivers, if necessary.

The card boasts the powerful NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU and 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory in chips from Hynix with a 2ns cycle time:

The nominal frequencies of the card are 950MHz (475MHz DDR) for the memory, 300MHz for the GPU in 2D and 475MHz for the GPU in 3D.

The overclocking potential of the EVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card is good enough, but no more than that. Without additional cooling and voltage tweaking, the card worked stable at 530MHz/1000MHz (500MHz DDR) (GPU/memory respectively). For a race with a RADEON 9800 XT, every extra megahertz would count, so I didn’t stop at “ordinary” overclocking, but went for extremities.

My usual preparations for extreme overclocking include two steps: increasing the voltage of the GPU and the graphics memory, and modding the cooling system.