![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , April 27, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
GeForceFX 5700U GDDR3
GDDR3 graphics memory is ready for the masses, and NVIDIA shows us that it can easily be adapted to even their current video cards. Are there any benefits to it? Many.
Test Setup:
ABIT IC7-G (i875P), Intel Pentium 4 3GHz “C”, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0b.
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5700Ultra – Operating at clock speeds 475MHz/906MHz using ForceWare 56.72 (WHQL).
BFG GeForceFX 5700Ultra – Operating at default clock speeds 475MHz/906MHz using ForceWare 56.72 (WHQL).
Clock for Clock:
The goal of our testing is to see if there is any impact in performance using GDDR3 versus GDDR2 on the GeForceFX 5700Ultra. For this we used a BFG GeForceFX 5700Ultra with 128MB of GDDR2 and compared it to the reference NVIDIA GeForceFX 5700Ultra with 128MB of GDDR3.
Above you can see that the BFG GeForceFX 5700Ultra card is clocked at 475MHz core and 906MHz memory by default.
The NVIDIA reference GeForceFX 5700Ultra with GDDR3 however is clocked at 950MHz memory frequency by default.
Therefore to make our “clock for clock” testing work we reduced the speed of the reference GeForceFX 5700Ultra to 906MHz memory to match the BFG GeForceFX 5700Ultra so they will both be on even terms.
Clocked for Overclocking:
Before we get to the comparison, we are sure that many of you are curious about how high we could overclock the GeForceFX 5700Ultra with GDDR3 memory. We left the core alone on both cards and simply manipulated the memory speed to compare them.
Above you can see we managed to get the BFG 5700Ultra to 1.02GHz DDR (501MHz) while we were able to get the NVIDIA 5700Ultra with GDDR3 to 1.10GHz DDR (550MHz) a 50MHz overclock over the GDDR2 memory.
In our graphed results we compared the two cards “clock for clock” and then we put in the performance numbers with the NVIDIA reference GeForceFX 5700Ultra with its memory overclocked to 1100MHz to see how much the added memory bandwidth alone effects performance in these games.