Factory overclocked cards have become extremely popular of late. Almost all the GPU manufacturers have overclocked cards available, some even tampering with low-end cards. One reason this has proved popular with the GPU manufacturers is the positive effect it has on brand image. For example, there is a reason why when Nvidia has the fastest graphics card available, ATI will try and win back the performance crown even if it means overclocking their current top-of-the-line product by a mere 20 MHZ and calling it a ‘PE’ or as I predict in the future the ‘XTXTXTXX Edition’. It’s all linked to brand awareness. Having the absolute fastest card on the market has a trickling effect on the sales of the entire range, whether that is at the low-end or high.

However, there is real potential here for the whole factory overclocked shebang to truly benefit the end-users and not lean so much towards pure marketing, and today’s review is a great example of this. A few weeks ago I received a press release from Gainward launching their new brand, BLISS. At the time I thought it was just simple repackaging with a new 3D girl on the box to entice in the nerds, but it was soon followed up with a phone call explaining the real deal.

With the launch of the BLISS branding, Gainward will now release three separate versions of popular performance cards; a vanilla reference board; a “Golden Sample” board with the same physical parts as the reference board but heavily overclocked on the core and memory; and finally a “Goes Like Hell” board with a redesigned PCB layout in red, the core heavily overclocked, and the standard memory found on all reference boards (pretty much all boards on the market) is thrown out the window and replaced with higher spec chips. In the case of the 6800 GS ‘GLH’ the memory has been increased from 2.0ns chips clocked at 1 GHz to 1.4ns chips clocked to 1.3 GHz. Oh, and there’s actually 512MB instead of 256MB, too. The additional cost over a stock reference board with no overclocks is a mere £40, and compared to overclocked 256MB 1.8ns based boards like the XFX Extreme Edition range it’s just £15. On the surface this looks to be a very good move and great news for the enthusiast on a modest budget.

So, why do I believe the factory overclocked market to be a superficial one? The retail cards currently available rarely change the specification of the reference board created by Nvidia, therefore it’s no guarantee you’ll achieve higher overclocking headroom with a factory overclocked card compared to that of a standard reference card overclocked by yourself with software tools such as ATI Tool or RivaTuner. In some cases I highly doubt any speed binning takes place at an AIB level. Take the 7800 GT’s as an example. Most of the factory overclocked boards available took the core up from 400 MHz to 450 MHz, and the memory from 1GHz to around 1.1GHz. This is easily achievable by 99.9% of all 7800GT’s out there. I highly doubt any AIB’s were speed binning 7800 GT’s on launch; they were most likely just re-labelling and bios tweaking unbinned cards. The cost of speed binning would not be worth the minimal risk that 0.1% of all inventories might actually show artifacts at these speeds and have to be RMA’ed.

There are some cards out there that are obviously speed binned, like some of the heavy weight 7800 GTX’s out there, but you still can never guarantee ANY reference spec’ed card will have higher head room than a basic non overclocked reference board.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not against factory overclocked cards at all, I just think it’s about time we got some serious enthusiast boards where the price premium gets you something extra at a physical level, and not just inflated clock speeds that any reference board can probably achieve with software overclocking. Thankfully Gainward are doing just this.

Gainward’s BLISS 6800 GS GLH is no reference board. Sure, the core headroom is still up to the gods, but the memory headroom will destroy the competition. I managed to clock the memory to 1480 MHz at its peak. Just try and do that on any other 6800 GS with 2.0ns memory, it just won’t happen…

It’s interesting to note that with its £180 price tag it has absolutely no competition right now. It’s around £50 more than an X800 GTO or 1600 XT and £50 cheaper than a 7800 GT or X1800 XL. It does offer a lot over a typical 6800GS for the price, but it’s going to come down to performance numbers to warrant its £180 price tag… Last year Gainward was purchased by a company called Palit, a multilateral manufacturer of both ATI and Nvidia cards. They have been responsible for a lot of restructuring throughout the company. One of there key strategies for 2006 is to revive what made Gainward so big in the first place – serious enthusiast boards.