NVIDIA GeForce SDR Roundup (February 00)

The path taken by NVIDIA in the TNT2 production line was a rather interesting one. Rather than sell the processor with a set clock speed, they sold the chips with recommended clock speeds. This placed the clock speed decision in the manufacturer's hands, allowing the producer to sell cards at what ever speed they felt the processor was stable at.

In a step that seems counterproductive, with the GeForce processor NVIDIA will not allow manufacturers to sell cards with speeds higher than the suggested 120/166 MHz rating for SDR cards. We have heard from quite a few manufacturers that NVIDIA will respond with "no" to any suggestion of selling a card overclocked, no matter how good the cooling of the card is. Due to lack of comment from NVIDIA, we are left to speculate why the clock and memory speeds of the GeForce are regulated. The first possible reason comes from competition levels. Perhaps NVIDIA does not want SDR cards to compete with higher priced DDR cards, as overclocking could reduce the margin of difference between the two cards. This makes perfect sense from a manufacturer's point of view, for they would not like to have a less expensive overclocked SDR card competing with a more expensive stock DDR card. However, this begs to question why NVIDIA also regulates the speed of DDR cards.

Another possibility is the fact that perhaps NVIDIA does not want GeForce cards competing with their upcoming chip, code named NV15. It is too early to tell how much faster this chip will perform compared to the GeForce processor, thus it is possible that the 6 month cycle that NVIDIA uses was too fast to produce a GeForce killing chip. By regulating the clock speed which manufacturers are able to sell GeForce cards at, this takes away from competition at the retail level.

Due to the regulations, all SDR GeForce cards come with the default clock speed of 120 MHz for the core and 166 MHz for the memory. While many companies are offering cards with higher rated RAM and more efficient cooling, it is not until the card is in your computer can overclocking take place. How feasible is this overclocking and how much difference does it make? Read on to the next two sections to find out.