When a new high-end graphics card comes out you like to think that a CPU with four cores clocked at 3GHz is going to do the job pretty well. Though, like most high-end cards, when we start to increase the CPU clock further, we can begin to see some really good gains in performance. So we've done exactly that today, we've moved our trusty Intel quad core Q6600 processor up to 3.75GHz but at the same time we thought that we may as well see what we can do with the clocks on the GeForce 9800 GX2. The increased clock speeds will be what most consumers can achieve without spending a load of cash on extreme cooling, with the GeForce 9800 GX2 using the stock standard air cooling. - TweakTown

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 Overclocked Card Preview

Word has leaked out that MSI will release a GeForce 9800 GX2 with a core clock of 660MHz so that was our starting point. Out of the box a default clocked GeForce 9800 GX2 will give you a 600MHz core clock, 1500MHz shader clock and 2000MHz effective clock on the memory. Climbing to 660MHz and beyond we found ourselves at 726MHz on the core which increased the shader clock up to 1815MHz. We moved on to the memory which saw an decent increase as well. The final memory clock we landed on was 2386MHz effective. How about we get started and see what the GX2 is capable of with some overclocking?

You can see as soon as we let the GeForce 9800 GX2 breath more with an increased CPU overclock, we really begin to see some big numbers. NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GX2 still isn't perfect though but with a good driver it could really begin to shine in the weeks to come but you get an early look with early drivers today of what is to come. In our opinion, NVIDIA could have taken a different approach to the GeForce 9 series instead of re-releasing the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and introducing the GeForce 8800 GT, these cards should have either not been released or released under the GeForce 9 series.

The problem is that the GeForce 8800 GT bought with it such exceptional value that NVIDIA were too high up on the podium. A new naming scheme should mean big things. Unfortunately at the moment it doesn't look like its being delivered. The bottom line is spec-for-spec the GeForce 9800 GX2 is still lower than two GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards. At least AMD didn't choose to release the Radeon HD 3870 X2 under a different series. This offering from NVIDIA is more GeForce 8800 than GeForce 9800 due to the fact that NVIDIA chose to implement the G92 core into the GeForce 8800 series products.

The next thing we want to know is how two of these GX2 cards scale. If we get only a minor increase though we will be as disappointed with the Quad SLI setup as we were with a pair of Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards in Quad CrossFire. Before we wrap this all up it's worth noting that we did a little bit of testing with the CPU at 3.75GHz and 3.8GHz with the GX2 at stock when we were just initially playing around and trying to find the sweet spot. The biggest gains were seen from the CPU overclock rather than the video overclocking. But as always we get into a bit of a mission and in this case it was to see if we could overclock this sucker.