NVIDIA GeForce DDR Roundup (March 00)

Clock speeds

Due to the fact that the processor found in DDR GeForce cards is identical to those found in SDR GeForce cards, the following excerpt from our NVIDIA SDR GeForce Roundup should suffice for a discussion of NVIDIA's policy on clock speeds.

The path taken by NVIDIA in the TNT2 production line was a rather interesting one. Rather than sell the processor with a set clock speed, they sold the chips with recommended clock speeds. This placed the clock speed decision in the manufacturer's hands, allowing the producer to sell cards at what ever speed they felt the processor was stable at.

In a step that seems counterproductive, with the GeForce processor, NVIDIA will not allow manufacturers to sell cards with speeds higher than the suggested [120/300 MHz rating for DDR] cards. We have heard from quite a few manufacturers that NVIDIA will respond "no" to any suggestion of selling a card overclocked, no matter how good the cooling of the card is. Due to lack of comment from NVIDIA, we are left to speculate why the clock and memory speeds of the GeForce are regulated. The first possible reason comes from competition levels. Perhaps NVIDIA does not want SDR cards to compete with higher priced DDR cards, as overclocking could reduce the margin of difference between the two cards. This makes perfect sense from a manufacturer's point of view, for they would not like to have a less expensive overclocked SDR card competing with a more expensive stock DDR card. However, this begs to question why NVIDIA also regulates the speed of DDR cards.

Another possibility is the fact that perhaps NVIDIA does not want GeForce cards competing with their upcoming chip, code named NV15. It is too early to tell how much faster this chip will perform compared to the GeForce processor, thus it is possible that the 6 month cycle that NVIDIA uses was too fast to produce a GeForce killing chip. By regulating the clock speed which manufacturers are able to sell GeForce cards at, this takes away from competition at the retail level.

Due to the regulations, all DDR GeForce cards we have seen come clocked at a stock speed of 120 MHz in the core and 300 MHz for the memory clock (150 MHz x 2). With the efficient cooling found on the majority of DDR GeForce cards, these low speed regulations result in high overclocking potential. In the next two sections we take a look at how cards deal with the additional heat of overclocking as well as how much performance can be gained by hot roding your DDR GeForce.