3DMark06, being a Shader 3.0 benchmark shows some additional improvements relative to the over clock, with an improvement in score of roughly 16%. We utilized 3DMark06 v1.1.0 on both the XP and Vista installations.
 

Half Life2 Episode 1, though not exactly a new game, is still somewhat representative of the “average” game an enthusiast might play today. We ran a demo from the beginning of the “Undue Alarm” section of the game, and recorded minimum, maximum and average frame rates over a 60 second run. All settings were set to their maximum's under XP and Vista x64, with screen resolution set to 1440x900 and a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Here when comparing stock and over clocked settings under XP, we see a clear performance bump, akin to a 24% increase in average frame rate. This is in line with the overall percentage increase in core clock, and is a welcome sign. Comparing stock clocks between XP SP2 and Vista x64 we see a situation mirroring our experience with 3DMark06, with there being no apparent differences in performance.

Relic's Company Of Heroes is a complex RTS game with significant system requirements and detail level available to it's rendering engine. The detail level available is quite amazing, especially for a game in the Real Time Strategy genre. We opted for a similar course of action here with COH, maximizing all settings in the game's control panel and utilizing a wide screen 1440x900 resolution. We ran Fraps again, and recorded min, max, and average frame rates through a 30 second cycle of the games first campaign tutorial.

Performance scaled considerably well between stock and over clocked settings, with average frame rate jumping close to 40%. Several runs were done back to back to verify this frame rate increase. It's interesting to note however that we're not seeing the astronomical frame rates we saw in HL2, as this is an obviously more taxing game. Again we see a wash between XP and Vista x64 here, and another good sign of Nvidia driver maturity in DirectX.

In the case of the Prey demo, a stunning game based on the Doom3 engine and OpenGL API, we opted to use a standalone benchmarking tool, HardwareOC PreyBench, as this gave us the ability to automate testing at many resolutions easily. The reason why we did this will become apparent shortly.

We tested at resolutions ranging from 800x600 to 1440x900, all with the highest possible texture and detail settings with 4x anti aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled. We utilized the default Guru3D demo included with the benchmarking tool.

Under XP things seem to be scaling pretty linear with the over clock, which is what we like to see. The story changes however under Vista x64, with Vista's OpenGL driver lagging XP's by nearly 20%. It's clear Nvidia has some work to do still with their Vista OpenGL driver.

All in all, performance across the board was quite acceptable with this card, and the gains to be had from over clocking are not insignificant. More to the point, performance within Vista x64 which is a worst-case-comparison scenario if there ever was one is almost identical, except in the case of OpenGL.

Time to wrap things up...