Quote:
|
Originally Posted by x-Max Of course the overclocked cards may be different, but i would stick with the reference designs since im interested more in quality and stability than that extra performance. |
yeah, that's where you really think a difference would be had in the parts.... but as i understand it the capacitors, filters, etc, are there for signal routing and filtering and since they are reactive parts and not discrete components, they don't have the pitfalls of silicon switching with regards to being run outside of their specified frequencies. also, back to the referneces design, they are probably more than decent anyhow.
this goes back to the engineering and QA team behind the design of the end product. i'm going to say that the more QA testing and design of a good QA program that goes into the process of releasing the part to the retail world is going to determine the output of overclicked parts. just like anything else in the mass producing IC world (memory, processors, etc) some parts may run better and faster than others above the speeds they were designed to run. so an active quality testing to determine which parts meet those specs and which do not will probably have a bigger effect on the reliability of those higher end products than the parts actually used to put them together. of course using inferior parts won't help, like what was mentioned with the nvidia reference design, they are more than likely using the same quality of parts they would be to tweak the chips to higher performance anyhow.
and yes, cooling solutions would definitely be the main concern here. in fact, that was the eVGA contraversy... they sold geforce card (can't remember if it was a 4 or FX/5 series card) that had a "high performance" heat sink on it, adding $50 to the cards price. in testing, it was shown that the heat sink they had designed was no more efficient than the nvidia reference heat sink.
granted this is not the case for all cooling solutions, and in fact many of the after market coolers are no better than some of the higher end manufacture's stock solutions, while some are absolutely incredible in how well they work.
i'd say, very similar to how stock car racing has rigerous standards thus putting the cars on an even "stock" playing field and thus only adjustments in suspension and aerodynamics are allowed to get an edge, in the video card world the coolers and fancy designs are what give these high end cards the edge in the market. just look at how many reviews have begun to consider noise as a factor with video cards, recognizing that air flow efficiency can beat out fan RPM's in cooling performance, thus making 2 identically featured video cards a world apart in real world use.