Overclocking for Beginners

It used to be that overclocking was the exclusive domain of hobbyists and enthusiasts who would pepper their discussions with arcane terms like 'multiplier locks' and 'front-side bus frequency'. Chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD would publicly discourage the practice by warning of the potential pitfalls involved. On the other hand, motherboard makers were complicit in the efforts of the overclockers, adding more BIOS options that supported overclocking. The same scenario is in recent times being mirrored in the graphics card arena too.

In order to gain 'street cred' among enthusiasts, vendors have added more overclocking-friendly features to their products, from factory overclocked cards that comes with higher than normal frequencies, to custom cooling solutions that aid overclocking, to software tools that make overclocking almost trivial with its simplicity. Preset overclocking profiles from vendors like MSI's Dynamic Overclocking Technology (DoT) and HIS iTurbo Mode is a no-brainer and consumers are even covered by the manufacturer for any damages sustained during use.

While it is debatable whether the mainstream consumers that purchase these cards actually try out the overclocking features included, the fact is that overclocking is now available for the masses with a click of the mouse. And this is about to be extended even further with MSI's latest GeForce 6600 GT, the NX6600GT-VT2D128E Diamond Edition.

MSI's latest innovation: the NX6600GT-V2TD128E Diamond.

Some of you may remember that we once did a review of MSI's Diamond edition GeForce 6600 here . That premium card featured an overclocked core and memory out of the box, and that is not including the fact that users could try to squeeze even more with MSI's bundled DoT utility. Now, MSI has gone one step further with their Diamond edition GeForce 6600 GT. The GeForce 6600 GT version does not have an overclocked core or memory as it operates at a rather typical frequency of 500MHz for the GPU and 1000MHz DDR for the frame buffer. However what it has is built-in voltage modifications that allow for greater overclocking by enabling increased voltage to the card when it is needed. MSI claims that it is the first graphics card in the world to simplify voltage overclocking and we detail how it works in this review. Here are the rest of its technical specifications: