55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review

Overclocking

Because I knew we were going to have limited time with these cards before the launch (we getting past 5am now…) I decided to forgo a couple extra gaming benchmarks and take a look at some quick overclocking results instead.  After all, we know how GT200 performance should scale with clock speeds and the three benchmarks we used seemed to verify that pretty well. 

To run these overclocking tests I used the latest version of RivaTuner, pushed the fan speed up to 100% on manual control and then set bumping up speeds by 5-10 MHz until the system wouldn’t loop through 3DMark Vantage.  When it would loop through once, I put it on a 3x loop and if it would pass that test I declared it stable.  Obviously for a better test we would do a lot more burn in, but this should be more than adequate for the results are trying to get. 

BFG GeForce GTX OCX – stock	BFG GeForce GTX OCX – overclocked

While we didn’t touch the memory speeds of either card, I was able to get the juices flowing even faster with the BFG card.  I was able to push the core clock rate up from 712 MHz all the way up to 775 MHz and the shader cores from 1620 MHz to 1675 MHz!  These are great overclocks and should pretty drastically increase of overall GPU performance. 

ASUS ENGTX285 TOP – stock	ASUS ENGTX285 TOP – overclocked

The ASUS GTX 285 card didn’t quite overclock as far, though to be fair, this could be more about luck-of-the-draw than anything ASUS has done.  Considering that all of these initial GTX 285 cards are made by Plantronics and just have different BIOS’ and stickers on them, most should perform about the same as we are seeing above.  Still, reaching 725 MHz core and 1650 MHz shader speeds is nothing to be ashamed of!