XFX 9800GT Review

The 8800GT used to be a good overclocker, as seen in our review of the Asus 8800GT Top earlier this year. I was expecting no less from this XFX card since it's newer and should carry at least some minor component upgrades, even though this one is the vanilla version. I was able to reach a healthy 750 MHz on the core, just 10 MHz under Asus's top end version, although still an impressive 150 MHz over the stock speed. That's a 25% increase, not too shabby since it's basically free extra performance. The GDDR3 clocked up to 1062 MHz, right on par with most GDDR3 overclocks. In order to get the clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU core and 1062 MHz on the memory I used an application called RivaTuner, which lets you clock the card high enough not be software limited. As you can see on the GPU-Z screenshot, even at 75% fan speed the card ran quite warm at 81 Celcius, although it was a quieter than a stock cooler set at the same speed.