Gainward CARDEXPERT GeForce3 PowerPack !!! 64MB

Overclocking

As we mentioned before, we were a bit concerned with how the CARDEXPERT GeForce3 PowerPack !!! would respond to overclocking due to its use of a thermal pad. It turns out, we were more than pleasantly surprised.

Our CARDEXPERT GeForce3 PowerPack !!! was able to hit a core speed of 235MHz, proving that the core is getting the cooling it needs to work properly. This is 35MHz over the shipping speed of the GeForce3 core and an impressive achievement for any card.

The thermal pad, which actually looks like a large square of Silly Putty without the tackiness, seems to have done a good job at transferring the heat form the core to the heatsink. And speaking of heatsinks, it seems that the smaller circular fan can perform just as well if not better than slightly larger square heatsinks.

We have seen the reference style RAM-sinks in the past, and this time they allowed us to reach a clock speed of 515MHz. As you can see, this is below the rated 530MHz of the memory chips, proving that our theory regarding low yields on 3.8ns chips.

Both our core and memory overclocking success can be attributed to luck as much as cooling efficiency. Luck or not, we did manage to get 235MHz out of our CARDEXPERT GeForce3 PowerPack !!! core and 515MHz out of the memory. This resulted in good overclocking capability, with the core going higher than most we have seen in the past.

As usual, PowerStrip was used to overclock the card since the CoolBits hack only allows for up to a 500MHz memory clock speed.