‘The short of it is: the GPUs on the cards that were having problems didn’t have the headroom necessary for the vendor’s overclocked specifications. The two most prominent problem areas were the vertex clock (which remember runs 50 MHz faster than the pixel clock) and the memory clock. These GPU subsystems were running far enough out of spec that the chips were having physical issues with stability; causing the random ‘freezes’ we were seeing.’Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- ATI’s Oblivion advantage – The ‘Chuck patch’ investigated @ Elite Bastards
- Pitting ATI against Nvidia with Oblivion @ ExtremeTech
- NGO NVIDIA Optimized Driver v1.8426 @ NGOHQ
- NVIDIA G80 Delayed @ CoolTechZone.com
- GeForce 7800GT Voltage BIOS Softmod @ NGOHQ
- ATI R600 Details Revealed @ CoolTechZone.com
- Arctic Cooling Accelero X2 VGA @ Technic3D
- Gigabyte’s GeForce 7 Series Tested @ TweakTown
- ASUS Extreme N7600GT @ Legion Hardware
- Sapphire Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX @ HotHardware.Com
- Connect 3D and Sapphire Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX @ AnandTech
Help for freezing manufacturer OC’d 7900GTXs

Ryan has managed to get nVIDIA to work on a fix for the freeze issue with the first run of factory overclocked 7900GTXs. If you bought one, and don’t seem to get what you paid for, read this article, and read it now.