Overclocking:

As with the 9800 XT the overclocking section of this review was always gong to be one of the most interesting sections. Out of the box the card is clocked at 500Mhz Core and 300Mhz memory, up from 400/300 on the 9600 Pro. To overclock the card we used Powerstrip which is available from http://www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm
Note: In the drivers provided to us the Overdrive facility was not available. This functionality will be added for the 9600 XT in a future driver.

Powerstrip gave us a stable overclock of 580/330 on the 9600 XT, an increase of 80mhz core and 30mhz ram. Considering the core is now 180mhz above the 9800Pro stock speeds the fact that the memory is still the same speed on an overclocked PRO and XT this seems quite disappointing, infact some Pro’s – like the Sapphire used to compare in this review can hit up to 350mhz memory! There is almost no chance of that speed with the RAM used on the XT reference design. Read on to find out how this affects the performance.

3dmark2003

Card	Settings	1024x768 0xAA 0xAF
500/600		3726 Marks
580/660		4190 Marks

3dmark 2001

Card	Settings	1024x768 0xAA 0xAF
500/600		12012 Marks
580/660		13025 Marks

Unreal Tournament 2003
1024x768 0xAA 0xAF

XT 500/600

XT 580/660

Despite our reservations about the memory speed the performance increases from overclocking the XT were quite substantial. 1000 points in 3D Mark01 for example is a huge increase.

Next: Conclusion