Seeing how well the Elsa Gladiac overclocked, I was really looking forward to overclocking the 3D Prophet II GTS. With what appears to be a better heatsink fan on the GTS chip and heatsinks on the RAM, I thought for sure it'll be able to overclock higher than the Elsa Gladiac.

What I got was a big disappointment. The 3D Prophet II locked up on me if I tried to run the core higher than 219Mhz. If the memory was pushed higher than 360Mhz, ugly artifacts start appearing on Quake 3. After a  few minutes the game would lock up, requiring a hard reboot. 

The highest stable overclock speed I could achieve was 218Mhz core and 357Mhz memory. This  is well off the 235Mhz core and 375Mhz memory I    got with my two Elsa Gladiacs. I decided this needed further investigating.  

Popping off the RAM heatsink gave me a good look at how it was held to the RAM. The RAM sink is glued to the sink using heatsink tape but it wasn't a very good gluing job. There are air gaps everywhere. Air doesn't transfer heat. Rather it traps it. So, instead of the heatsink removing the heat off the RAM, it may be trapping it.

While the heatsink used for the core is bigger than the one used by the Elsa, its clipping system is not that great. The little plastic clip that hold the heatsink in place doesn't apply enough pressure to make good contact with the nVidia GTS chip. Removing the sink also reveal air gaps between the heatsink and the GTS chip.

What looked like the most overclockable GeForce2 card turned out to be one of the least overclockable. It may be that the card I got was just a bad sample. You really can't tell with just one sample. I will know more once I get the 64Meg 3D Prophet II to play with. As it stands, if you're looking to overclock your Geforce2, the 3D Prophet II is not where it's at.

Next Page: Rating

[Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] [Page 4] [Page 5] [Page 6] [Home]