Conclusion

So, the two competitors – MSI NBOX and PowerColor R98-C3 – proved to be worth each other in our extreme overclocking race. The performance gain both cards provided was about 20% - 30%. It is a solid surplus above the ordinary frequencies of those cards, and the upcoming “officially overclocked” chips – R360 and NV38 – will hardy offer anything like that.

As our testing showed, both: the 0.13micron GeForce FX 5900 Ultra chip and the ATI RADEON 9800 Pro made with an already out-dated 0.15micron technology, have a good reserve of frequency left. By the way, NVIDIA’s transition to the 0.13micron process doesn’t necessarily mean that 0.15micron is completely obsolete. The excellent results the RADEON 9800 PRO chip showed today are a striking proof of the opposite.

But back to our cards. The PowerColor product offers higher overclockability of the GPU and memory and exceeds MSI card in the performance gain value. Moreover, ATI RADEON 9800 PRO behaves much more predictably during overclocking.

MSI NBOX card loses somewhat in terms of overclocking potential, but makes up for it with its gorgeous package, elegant looks and rich accessories set.

And if we take into consideration only the benchmarking results shown in the last diagram, we would come to a conclusion that both cards are in fact peers. Of course, there is no reason to choose any of them basing on the results of one gaming benchmark only. Well, this review was not about comparison and choosing between NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and ATI RADEON 9800 PRO, it was about extreme overclocking! That’s why the following note seems necessary:

Reminder:

• This research is just a kind of experiment and shouldn't be regarded as an appeal to taking up extreme overclocking and graphics cards resoldering.
• These modifications shorten your card's service life.
• Any sort of mechanical modifications deprives the users of the warranty.
• Should the graphics card or other components be wrecked, the users bear the complete responsibility for their actions.

This link takes you to the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo record I used in the tests: tim_demos.rar (616KB).