MSI has built a technology into their drivers called D.O.T. Express. D.O.T. stands for Dynamic Overclocking
Technology. MSI claims this is the easiest way to optimize the GPU and memory speed for maximum performance.
MSI also claims this technology smartly detects and saves the GPU from overheating and overspeeding. The
card already comes clocked higher than a normal 7600GT, so anything else that you can squeeze out of it is cool.
Vivid Control Panel
The control panel allows for 6 different overclocking levels, ranging from 2% overclocked to 10% overclocked.
I tried this card on all levels. The best performance I could find was on the "Colonel" level, which is 8%
overclocked. At the 9% and 10% overclock levels, performance degraded beyond usefulness.
Clock Control Panel
Using Coolbits, I unlocked the nVidia overclocking control panel. I tried to manually overclock the card 8%, but
it failed during testing of the settings. The maximum clock speeds that I could get from the Detect Optimal
Frequencies were 599MHz Core Clock and 797MHz Memory Clock. With these settings, 3DMark scores were not as good as
they were at "Colonel" level, so I used the MSI control panel to overclock the card.
This review will look at the performance of this video card in some of my favorite games, as well as 3DMark2005
and 3DMark2006. The games that were chosen for this review are FarCry, Half-Life 2, and Quake 4. It will also
look at the overclocking performance of this card.
3DMARK
3DMark05 and 3DMark06 v1.02 were both used for the synthetic tests of the NX7600GT. In overclocked mode, there
was a 6% increase in 3DMark06 and a 7% increase in 3DMark05. These scores were lower than the scores produced
by MSI in their documentation. Since they did not post their system specs, I can only assume that the system
I tested on is not as powerful as their test system.
3DMark
GAME BENCHMARKS
All games were run using 3 resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The games were tested in 5 modes
under each resolution, 0AA/0AF, 4AA/8AF, 4AA/8AF with Gamma Correct and Supersampling, 4AA/16AF, 4AA/16AF with Gamma
Correct and Supersampling. For all games, I averaged 3 of 4 benchmarks, throwing out the lowest.
