[TPU] 9600GT secret exposed - Overclock.net

**grunion** · 02-29-08

Not much for posting news, but I was checking to see if there were any ATItool updates and ran across an article written by W1zzard.

Very interesting read about the clock speeds of the 9600GT and how they directly correlate to the set PCI-E frequency.

Quote:

The idea of implementing a mechanism that directly increases the GPU frequency (and performance) based on the PCI-Express base frequency is a great novelty. It has the potential to offer hassle-free performance improvements to a large number of less experienced users. Being able to adjust this frequency in most modern BIOSes is a big plus because it will be applied without any software installation requirement in Windows (or any other operating system - there is your Linux overclocking).

The execution of this from NVIDIA's side is less than poor in my opinion. They did not communicate this new feature to reviewers at all, nor invented a marketing name for it and branded it as a feature that their competitors do not have.
Even when asked directly we got a bogus reply: "the crystal frequency is...". No, there is no 25 MHz crystal and its frequency is not fixed either. I'm not accusing the sender of the E-Mail of course, I just believe he didn't know, maybe this fact wasn't communicated to the marketing team at all. However, if you would get such an inquiry wouldn't you look into this further if it was your job to properly promote a product?

More room for speculation can be found in the driver. Why does it always return the "normal" frequency and not the real one? Maybe the driver developers didn't know about this either, who knows. I find it hard to believe that the internal communication lacks that much in a company which constantly delivers excellent, high-performing products.

It is certainly nice for NVIDIA to see their GeForce 9600 GT reviewed on NVIDIA chipsets with LinkBoost enabled where their card leaves the competition behind in the dust (even more). Also it could send a message to customers that the card performs considerably better when used on an NVIDIA chipset? Actually this is not the case, the PCI-Express frequency can be adjusted on most motherboards, you will see these gains independent of Intel/AMD CPU architecture or Intel/NVIDIA/AMD/VIA chipset.

While nothing is wrong with having a better product (and I do believe this is a feature that makes the product better), being transparent about such changes should be the proper way to do it in this industry.

I would also like to invite NVIDIA to send us a statement explaining the reasoning behind this and maybe reveal some additional technical details of this great idea.

Quote:

Also it will have an extra performance advantage when reviewers compare the non-overclocked GeForce 9600 GT against any other card which is commonly done in most reviews.

Source

specops · 02-29-08

interesting... hm... i wish my card did that by increasing PCI E

Fox_Smash · 03-01-08

Wow this seems nice,but it is actually safe to OC the PCIE bus like that?

mechtech · 03-01-08

I increased My PCIE to 105 and lost my raid array after a few weeks...

I don't think that setting should be messed with unless you're trying to push a GPU overclock from 1000mhz to 1005mhz, it really has almost no effect unless you're LN2 cooling GPUs.

I don't know why Nvidia chose to have the 9600 affected by the PCIE frequency, it's 1 more variable to deal with that doesn't really need to be there.

**grunion** · 03-01-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fox_Smash

Wow this seems nice,but it is actually good to OC the PCIE bus like that?

115 is my limit, I've had corruption at great freqs than that.

majin death · 03-01-08

i dont mind as long as it runs better and has a life time warranty (evga)

gamervivek · 03-01-08

so the card is better than the reviews with higher pcie frequency or did the reviews have the higher frequency pcie bus too?
nice find rep+

Tricky · 03-01-08

I read about this on OcUK Forums, interesting read.. Shame no 8800 cards can benefit from a pci-e freq boost.. I'd have mine at 110.

How would the 9600GT overclock in windows with the pci-e freq boosted, since the OC app still reads normal frequencies? Will it just clock about 9-10% more than it sais it is at 110PCI-E Freq?

003 · 03-01-08

Guys, the OP made this sound like a good thing that nvidia has done. Why don't you have a look at the full original article:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/N...Shady_9600_GT/

Leck · 03-01-08

And what does this tell us?

8800GT/GTX > 9600

Still - for the price of the card its a great card

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[TPU] 9600GT secret exposed

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