VR Features
Gainward Bliss 9600GT Dynamic Duo
Overclocking and Conclusion
Written by Firefox and filed under Reviews > GPUs & Graphic Cards
Published on April 7, 2008, 1:34 am
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With a little help from RivaTuner, we were able to overclock both the BLISS 9600GT and the Golden Sample. A quick run of 3DMark 06 confirmed the stability of the overclocks and allowed us to glean an insight on the performance boost we can expect from the increased speed.
Gainward BLISS 9600GT Overclock GPU/ Shader/ Mem (733/1850/1053)
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Gainward BLISS 9600GT Golden Sample Overclock GPU/ Shader/ Mem (766/1950/1095)
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With better 2-slot coolers, both the BLISS 9600GT and its Golden Sample cousin overclocked quite well and turned out reasonable results. The BLISS 9600GT was clocked to a respectable 733MHz on the core with shaders at 1850MHz and memory reaching 1052MHz (2104MHz DDR). For the records, that is faster than the Golden Sample's default clocks and churns out a 3DMark 06 score of 13449 - approximately 1,500 points above stock.
On the other hand, we have the Golden Sample. It would be a shame if it didn't do better than the regular 9600GT in clocking and it doesn't disappoint us. The 9600GT Golden Sample readily clocked to 766MHz GPU, 1950 on the Shaders and 1095MHz (2190MHz) on memory. Every bit better than its regular cousin and turns out a score of 13970 in 3DMark06 - about 1,100 point boost from an already higher than normal score of 12,887. It might be difficult to visualize all of these scores and so I made a nice chart to show just how the cards fare when overclocked.
Conclusion
Both of the Gainward cards performed respectably throughout our testing with the Golden Sample readily showing its advantage by consistently throwing out better scores than either its lesser cousin or the reference NVIDIA card. The regular Gainward 9600GT also showed up with slightly better scores in some of the games and 3DMark06 as well. Although it seems somewhat inexplicable, the card is based on an in-house design and that might be the key to its performance advantage (due to slightly lower latencies from trace lengths or as my buddy tells me, "Red goes faster!"). The addition of the mesh on the 9600GT also helps to make the card look better for those of you with a casing side-panel window. Ditto for the Golden Sample card with its red and black shroud which looks quite mean as well.
Something similar to cards is the use of dual-slot cooling. Whilst some users may argue that it eats into the slot beside the PCI-e slot, the dual-slot cooler allows for a quiet solution whereas the reference NVIDIA single slot cooler does get quite noisy once the load goes up. With the Golden Sample, the heatpipe heatsink also negates the need for a 3rd party heatpipe cooler that adds additional cost. Furthermore, the addition of the HDMI output and DisplayPort differentiates it from the run-of-the-mill pre-overclocked graphics cards from other manufacturers. Add to that, the 3-phase power and an in-house PCB design and you have what can truly be called a Golden Sample coming from Gainward. All in all, both 9600GT offerings from Gainward offer more than the regular reference design 9600GT cards from other manufacturers but come in at a very similar price point. Thus, both 9600GT offerings from Gainward looks a lot better than competition, and with competitive prices,they do deserve the 80 VR-Marks awards.
