Review: Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD (Page 6/10) Posted: May 6, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Overclocking Leadtek uses the fastest DDR memory available, which is rated at an ultra low 4ns. Since the 4ns RAM is clocked just like memory used on other GeForce3 boards, we should be able to overclock the WinFast GeForce3 quite a bit.

Using the Coolbits registry addon, we managed to increase the GeForce3 core from 200MHz to 230MHz! Leadtek has told me that NVIDIA has supplied them with newer chip revisions that should yield better speeds. Memory was successful up to a blistering 543MHz from 460MHz -- a total leap of 83MHz from default! Since the GeForce3 uses a totally new memory architecture that is 400% to 700% more efficient than the GeForce2, there should be less of a performance increase from memory overclocking. GeForce2 gained more significant increases from overclocking the RAM because it was heavily held back from memory bottlenecks.

Here are the overclocking results on a Pentium 4 1.5GHz machine:



Just as I thought -- increasing the memory didn’t do much for the GeForce3. This is the reason why NVIDIA uses the same memory clock speed by default, as the GeForce2 Ultra. The Crossbar memory architecture is already highly efficient.

The Thunderbird system gains more of a performance increase from overclocking than the Pentium 4 system but it appears that any noticeable increase would only be seen at resolutions higher than 1280x1024. Next Page