GigaCube Radeon 9600 Pro Game Buster

Company: GigaCube
Product: Radeon 9600 Pro Game Buster
Street Price: ~$145
Date Reviewed: July 30, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Overclocking the 9600 Pro Game Buster:

PowerStrip is an overclocking and tweaking program that can be used with most of the video cards out today. Overclocking the video card is simple. We start by overclocking the core first, going in 5 MHz increments and testing for stability using 3DMarks 2001 SE in loops. Then we do the same thing when overclocking the memory. The highest stable overclock we could achieve with the GigaCube card was 480MHz on the core and 340MHz on the memory. These are good overclocks but the core is not the best we have seen. There are a few other cards that go beyond 500MHz. Perhaps adding a better cooler would help in overclocking but it may also void the warranty of the card.

As you can see there are some significant performance gains from overclocking the video card. The score above is 1580 point above the stock score or about a 13% performance increase. 3DMarks is a synthetic benchmark but it does give a good general idea of how a card performs. So to some up the overclocking, the card does well. If you want a few more frame rates, overclocking is a valid option but again, it may void the warranty.