Date: November 22nd, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Albatron
<--CLICK FOR PRICES ON THE LATEST NVIDIA GEFORCE VIDEOCARDS IN AMERICA
<--CLICK FOR PRICES ON THE LATEST NVIDIA GEFORCE VIDEOCARDS IN CANADA

PRODUCT PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH

Once the card it turned over you will notice that there is no cooling at all installed on the back memory modules. Why they have chosen to cool one side and not the other is beyond me. For maximum videocard memory overclocking stability, you need to have all memory modules cooled and not just half of them. When you push up the memory frequency clock from its' native 500Mhz speed, the lack of cooling on the back modules will have them fail before the cooled modules which will more or less render the cooling useless. You cool them all, or you don't cool them at all. Just keep them all the same. With that being said you can some up the memory cooling on this card to be practically useless and all you have is a good VPU core cooler.

The memory on this card consists of eight 16meg modules rated at a latency of 4ns, a theoretical maximum speed of 500Mhz DDR and a 128bit interface. Seeing this card is stock clocked at the maximum, it will be interesting to see just how far I can push the memory when overclocking.

VIDEOCARD OVERCLOCKING

With a rather lackluster overclocking foundation thanks to the improper cooling, I was not expecting a whole lot from this card initially, but as you will see I was pleasantly surprised and impressed.

With the Nvidia Coolbits RegHack enabled, we set off to see just how far we can push this card.

Stock Settings

Maximum Artifact Free Overclocked Settings

Results:

Core Overclock: 106Mhz
Memory Overclock: 155Mhz

These results are nothing to be ashamed of at all. When the 5Mhz overclock increments that just kept on coming, I was wondering when this card was going to wave the white flag and head to France. It just never gave up and the resulting overclock left me a little shocked.

The overclocked settings will be included in all benchmarking and will illustrate just how much more free performance you obtain with a little adventure.

But, what then popped in my head was what this card could possibly do if there was ramsinks installed. With a small investment and a little time you could easily squeeze maybe another 5-10Mhz out of the properly cooled modules.