Overclocking The GeForce 2 GTS

Conclusion

It used to be that the goal for overclocking was to get the highest core speed and the fastest memory speed while maintaining stability. This, however, is no longer the case. With the arrival of the GeForce 2 GTS we see the limitations of a slow memory system come into play. Even a few months ago, this was not the case. The DDR GeForce 256 seems to have adequate memory speed to allow the GPU to function at almost full power.

Features such as the the GeForce 2 GTS's ability to process eight textures per clock as well as the card's increased raw speed (MHz) provide for a memory road block to be hit because the memory pipeline simply can not handle the information being thrown to it and requested. Therefore, we see the GPU has speed to spare due to the fact that it is usually waiting on the memory. This fact is displayed by the huge performance increase that occurs when the memory clock is overclocked and the poor performance gain obtained by overclocking the core clock.

The best way to overclock you GeForce 2 GTS? As proved above, you will want to play with the memory clock settings until it is as high as it will go. Next, increase the core speed step by step until the card becomes unstable. Unlike previous cards, we no longer want to get the most out of our core as well: it has become secondary.

The next few months should prove to be interesting. Rumors of 5.5 and 5 ns DDR SGRAM/SDRAM chips coming out are starting to be heard, meaning that the card will operate stock at the high DDR memory speed of 400 MHz (366 MHz in the case of the 5.5 ns chips). However, with all that speed to be gained, what will happen next? Naturally, we will push the new chips to the limit by overclocking in an attempt to produce the fastest card possible. Who knows, maybe if we push enough perhaps we can start to get rid of this nagging memory bottleneck. Only overclocking will tell; for the time being.