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Originally posted by gmat
Duh. [H] overclocking a test sample doesnt meant sh*t. WTF are they modding a test sample anyway ?
Test samples are that, beta-quality, pre-release, *unfinished* products. Unfinished drivers as well, and no you cannot fine-tune anything until you've got the real thing in your engineering hands. It has been seen before, final drivers usually boost up the performance for quite an amount.

"530/535 which is far from stellar" -> !!! Dude look at these figures, 535 DDR that means 1070 -> PC8560 memory !!! Try to touch that with anything else than a mainframe.
And a *better designed* chip at 500 MHz is likely to be more efficient than a *older* chip at 300 MHz.
Currently those test sample benchmarks are what they are, test samples.

BTW i've seen prices for the 9700pro, they're level with announced FX prices.

U think the r300 was such a pain in the ass to overclock when it was in the preview state? And no overclockability hasnt improved very much with newer revisions in the vidcard segment, u might be confused with the cpu segment. The NV30 only has 128bit wide bus, if u overclock the radeon 9700pro with 50MHz then u increase the bandwitdh 2X than with a similar OC on the nv30. The radeon 9700pro has more bandwidth then the nv30 stock and is easier to overclock. Why does the nv30 have a better designed chip if it cant beat the radeon 9700 which is 175MHz slower clocked? Are u an nvidiot? I think so. Ohh and the drivers.. there wont be that much to gain there since nvidia has had a looooooooong time to finetune their drivers while waiting for 0.13micron and DDR2. If they only are test samples why did they give the cards to the reviewsites and make their supposed r300-killer look like ****? Think about it.....