Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 GeForce 2 GTS

Overclocking

In our quest to push the GeForce 2 GTS to its limits, we have seen cards come and go. The vast majority of these cards, no matter what cooling method or additional feature, would max out at an overclocked speed of about 232 MHz in the core. These cards showed a wide variation in cooling methods, from the huge heatsink of the Leadtek WinFast GeForce 2 GTS to the thermally glued heatsink/fan of the ELSA GLADIAC, proving that there must be something more behind overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS. This left two other variables dictating overclockabilty: chip quality and card design.

Chip quality, as discussed in our Overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS Guide, is a result of transistor conductivity, a function of the ratio between the transistor length and width. Since both transistor length and width vary during the manufacturing process, chip quality varies. A chip of "good" quality may be an excellent overclocker, while one made at the same plant may be deemed "poor" quality and overclock to a very small extent. Most chips fall in the middle range, meaning that most GeForce 2 GTS chips are capable of overclocking to some extent. The problem is that neither card manufacturer nor the product consumer can know if the chip they have received is of "good" quality. Therefore, this part of the overclocking game is luck.

Card design, on the other hand, seems to be the only avenue left that manufacturers can take to ensure good overclocking success. Since every GeForce 2 GTS card we have seen is based on NVIDIA's reference design, the aspect of card design we are referring to are the components used in the card. By using higher quality components and ensuring that the core receives a good power signal, card designers can choose to produce a card that is more stable and more overclockable than competing cards. Many times, manufacturers choose to cut corners here, using lesser quality components to cut cost. With the low $299 price tag on the 3D Blaster Annihilator 2, one would assume lower quality components were used to help bring the cost down. We are glad to report that this is not the case at all.

Despite the overclocking method described in our Overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS Guide, we did not choose to overclock the RAM to the highest possible speed and then increase the memory core because this method of overclocking does not stress the card design itself, but rather it only stresses the quality of the RAM chips used. For this reason, when we overclocked the our 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 (using the procedure described on page 5 of our Overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS Guide), we overclocked both the core and the memory speeds together. What this resulted in shocked us and spread a smile across our faces.

The Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 was able to obtain both core and memory speeds never yet seen in the GeForce 2 GTS. Using NVIDIA's built in tweak tool we slowly pushed the card higher and higher until we could not overclock anymore. However, unlike our past experiences, this time we were limited not by the card but by NVIDIA's drivers! That is right, for the first time in AnandTech history, and very well for the first time in any major stock card review, we were able to push the GeForce 2 GTS core up to a blazing 250 MHz. Using a bit of simple mathematics (250 MHz x 4 pipelines x 2 textures per clock), we were able to calculate that the card was actually running at 2 Gigatexels per second, making it "AnandTech's first 2 Gigatexel Game Accelerator," as the marketing slogan goes. This is up from the 1.6 Gigatexels per second that the stock GeForce 2 GTS does.

As we proved in our Overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS Guide, there is more to overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS than just its core: memory clock speed plays a vital role in maximum speed. Luckily, we were equally impressed with the maximum memory speed at such a high core speed. Our 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 was able to run completely stable at a 395 MHz memory clock speed, 62 MHz above the stock memory speed. Every bit of this memory speed is needed with such a blazing fast core, and, as our tests show, the 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 was able to use every last bit of that precious memory bandwidth.

Keep in mind that the overclockabilty of our card may not be typical of other 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 cards. Naturally, your mileage may vary. It is possible that our card just can with an exceptionally good quality chip and that other 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 cards are bound to overclock differently (however the fact that the card would allow the chip to run at this speed does show the good quality of the card).