Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of Rivatuner, ATITool and our benchmarking suite.



The final overclocks of our card are 784 MHz core (16 % overclock) and 1153 MHz Memory (5 % overclock). Even though the overclocks are very respectable, I would have expected a higher maximum memory frequency, given the 0.8 ns memory installed on the card.
Either way, I think Palit should increase the default core and memory speeds of their GeForce 9800 GTX cards and release an overclocked version - the clock headroom is apparently there.

Temperatures

When I did the thermal testing, which is done with the card as it comes out of the box, I noticed some very high load temperatures. After replacing the thermal paste, the temperatures dropped to normal levels.