Overclocking GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and 5900 Ultra or what do we get after removing the GPU cover

The latest news from our videolab: having decided to get deeper than usual tinkering with GeForce FX cooling systems, Andrey Vorobyev, our video section editor, removed the GPU covers that are actually decorative and tried to install the cooling system on the GPU core directly.

The results were naturally stunning: under the cover there was a heat conducting layer that was nevertheless a thermal barrier in the entire cooling system. Below you can see the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra GPU on Albatron´s graphics card:

What do we get from the experiment? A lot with an accurately reworked cooling system for closer on-GPU installation. In the case above the default GPU/memory clock speeds were 400/800 MHz with up to 466MHz overclocking potential. After the redesign we were able to overclock GPU to 500MHz!

We´ve done the same to ASUS V9950 on GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. But as the cooling system was common GPU and memory, we found out that heatsink doesn´t get close to the GPU because of the legdes for memory chips (see the close-up below.)

We just had to polish them to provide the better joint. But you can actually use the reference cooling that is separate for GPU and memory, as you know. After all this we raised the overclocking potential from 496MHz to 525MHz at 450MHz default clock, while the memory worked at up to 980MHz at the 850MHz default!

I can hardly say what is the purpose of these literally undercover gaps. Perhaps, there´s some homespun truth we don´t know of. Anyway, our experiments showed GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and 5900 Ultra have rather high overclocking potential that gives more chances to their owners and also allows makers to produce more overclocker products in the future. :)

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