Ok, so it looks pretty good out of the box, showing around a 7fps advantage over the V6600 'Pure' version at 1024x768x32 in Q3A. Now to see how it handles when tweaked a little. The first thing I did was remove the heatsink, and clean off the old thermal paste. I then reapplied a nice small blob of paste, and re-fitted the heatsink, ensuring that the paste had spread nice and thinly right out to the edges. I do this to satisfy myself that the interface from GPU to heatsink is nice and tight, without too much paste acting as a thermal blanket. This is important when trying to obtain the boards maximum overclock while still using the original heatsink and fan.

Normally, I would also attach a thermal probe so as I can monitor the temperature of the GPU, but in this case I was able to use ASUS's SmartDoctor utility.

The SmartDoctor utility is pretty good actually, giving an indication of voltages, fan speed, and core temperature. You can enable the SmartCooling Technology from within SmartDoctor, to allow the utility to slow the GPU down, reducing core temp if required.

I disabled this feature, as I did not want it to kick in while I was benchmarking. Note that the GeForce idles at 58 degrees C - that's pretty warm…

I was going to use the ASUS Tweak utility to overclock the card, but unfortunately ASUS Tweak only allows a maximum of 195MHz memory and 142Mhz graphics engine…

… so I used PowerStrip instead.

I started by tweaking the memory clock in 5MHz increments. I tested stability by playing Quake 3 Arena for a few minutes, and if all ok, I ran the Demo001 timedemo to benchmark it. I tested at 1024x768x32, full graphics detail.

At 215MHz, video corruption set in, so I stepped it back to 210MHz as the maximum. The use if 5ns ram certainly allows a decent overclock, though the overall improvement is only 3 frames per second. Leaving the memory at 210MHz, I then proceeded to overclock the core.

The V6600 Deluxe managed a maximum of 160MHz GPU, which is a decent jump from the standard 140MHz, and a big jump from the reference 120MHz. However, as you can see from the graph, the GPU overclock was only worth 1 frame per second. I also noted that the core temp rose quite quickly when overclocking the GPU, reaching maximums of well over 70 degrees C. For Longevity, I certainly could not recommend this, and the overall improvement does not really justify it. It seems that the main bottleneck for GeForce is the memory, and therefore most performance gains can be made in this area. DDR Ram would have been nice. Here's a shot of the maximum overclock.