It is almost the norm to see overclocking results in your typical video card review. We have have been doing it since the 3DFX Voodoo, and usually you see the same thing. A card will be overclocked until it locks up or visual distortion begins, and a few benchmarks are run. You always have to think if the card tested was a golden sample.  Would this happen with a card you bought off the shelf? With that in mind we decided that a test of more than just one card was necessary to see how a model would perform in the same testing environment. Would each card overclock similarly? Would there be major differences in top speeds?

Do do this we turned to our recent upgrade at our gaming center, Tek Republik, from XFX GeForce 7900GTs to XFX GeForce 9600GTs. It was an excellent chance to get overclock numbers from not just one card, but from 24. The model chosen was the PVT96GYDF4 clocked at the standard 650MHz for the GPU, 900MHz for memory, and 1625MHz shader clock. Each card was tested on the same system with a Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB of Corsair DDR2 800MHz on the Asus 590 SLI based CrossHairwith an 850 watt Antec Truepower Quattro. We pushed each card to its limits using Riva Tuner, and to test for stability Crysis was used. It made quick work of a clock speed it didn't like usually with a crash quickly into the built in GPU benchmark.

We topped out near 800/1100/2000 for many of these cards? Crysis made some pay that tried to?make it through the GPU benchmark? Here are our top clocks for each card to make it through stabley?

In each graph we show each overclocked card results, and the stock number as card zero for reference? As you can see results for almost all overclocks were very similar with 19 topping out at 790MHz? Two made it to 801MHz, and 3 managed just 708MHz? On average a 20% overclock was accomplished?