Overclocker Cafe - Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS iChill Review

Quake 4 was recorded in the MCC Landing Area. Settings set to high with FSAA at 0x and resolution to 1600 x 1200. Quake 4 has an in game frame limit of 60fps as you can see below. The drop below the 30 fps mark graphed in the chart was unknown to me until I looked at the results. Gameplay was smooth with no complaints here.

Minimum 7900 GS - 18 / Minimum 7900 GS iChill - 20
Maximum 7900 GS - 63 / Maximum 7900 GS iChill - 63
Average 7900 GS - 44 / Average 7900 GS iChill - 47

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is still a crowd pleaser. Our frame rates were taken from the NFS World Loop map. Screen resolution was set to 1600 x 1200 with all other settings (except V-Synch and FSAA both turned off) set to max.

Minimum 7900 GS - 25 / Minimum 7900 GS iChill - 31
Maximum 7900 GS - 49 / Maximum 7900 GS iChill - 59
Average 7900 GS - 38 / Average 7900 GS iChill - 46

The difference between the core and memory clock speeds between the iChill and standard unit are really apparent here. Not just apparent but fairly significant.

Overclocking

With all the added cooling, especially the memory, we decided to see what kind of reach we could get. Using Coolbits and some manual adjustments over the space of an hour or so we came up with a stable ceiling for our card. We were able to overclock the core from its original 550MHz up to a whopping 644MHz. The memory also yielded a nice gain hitting 1690MHz up from its original 1500MHz. Loading up Need For Speed again, we did a do over.

Minimum iChill OC - 33 / Minimum iChill - 31
Maximum iChill OC - 67 / Maximum iChill - 59
Average iChill OC - 52 / Average iChill - 46

Very impressive. Did you say this was a $200 card??

BACK NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - Old Lion vs. New Lion
Pg 3 - The new lion / Performance
Pg 4 - Performance / Overclocking
Pg 5 - Temperature / Conclusion