8% overclock......pathetic, you need to learn to overclock better.
you also need to learn that 3dmark dosnt mean shit in REAL GAME PERFORMANCE.
let me explain, you see 3dmark is a synthetic benchmark tool, it dosnt use situations that real games use, its fine for comparing tweaks and stability testing, infact thats what i use it for, i run a loop over night and if the systems still going in the morning then i know my video overclocks stable.
3dmark and other synthetic benches are VERY prown to inconsistancys from system to system, you can change 1 setting in bios or drivers that wont have any effect on real games and you can loose 1500 3dmarks.
example, i have 2 systems here, both are socket 754 3700+@2.65gz, x800xt pe cards, 2gb hign end ram, everything the same except the motherboard, ones a chantech vnf3-250 the other has an MSI nf3-250 in it, guess what, even with the same memory settings and other bios tweaks the chantech board system gets over 1000points on the msi system, when you look deeper into it you find that the async latancy is 1ms diffrant between the 2 boards, that setting has NO effect on games, both systems play farcry,fear,hl2,quake4,doom3,prey and a host of other games with the same avg fps, oh and yes the os's are the same infact they are cloned from drive to drive(was to lazy to do 2 installs so i did 1, same hardware other then board brands...why work harder then u need to? )
i understand you think you know alot about videocards and whats better, but from what i can see you lack real world experiance dealing with a wide spectrum of hardware, i dont, i deal with this shit every day, 8600,8800,3850,3870, blah blah blah, i have had about every card you can think of at one point or another, i had compaired 64 to 128 128 to 256 256 to 512 and so on, and you know what, at first the extra ram dosnt tend to make a huge diffrance but then games come out or are patched to take advantege of the extra ram, also companys like ati/amd and nvidia tend to take a bit of time to optimize the drivers to allow the cards to truely take advantege of the extra ram.
example, ati's x800 drivers, at first the cards perf was kickass, but then after a couple driver revisions they put out a driver that was made to optimize the use 256mb of ram the x800pro/xt cards had on them, it also boosted 9800xt 256mb perf as well tho!!!, there was up to a 90fps boost in some games(FARCRY!!!!!!) i think it was the 4.12 rivers that did it, cant remmber its been a few years, but point is that after they did that the cards perf stomped the 128 me cards of the day, it also made an already fast card even faster.........same can happen here, i dont give nvidia alot of credit in the driver update market, mainly because i have seen how they can cock that up, but in this case they could very well put out a driver that will give these 1gb cards an easy boost.
the 2900xt 1gb got a nice boost from a driver update from what one review update i read said, will look for the site later, my net is being slow as turtles stampeeding thru peanutbutter tonight.
as my german friend would say "you fail it" meaning you lack proper knowlage to continue this argument.
to use a like from tv "you are the weakist link, good buy"
ps dont take this wrong, i just get sick of people talking out their asses about stuff they dont have any personal experiance with.