Curiosity soon turned to reality, as we pushed the 125MHz core speed of our beta Rage Fury MAXX to 137MHz, and the ram speed from 143MHz to approximately 166MHz.

This 10% improvement in core/memory speeds netted a 4 to 6% frame rate improvement in the same tests we used with the default clocked MAXX card for this piece.

You'd expect that doubling the chance for errors due to overclocking by including 2 x 32MB ram banks and 2 x graphics processors versus a standard video card would have been a strong impediment to any overclocking at all, but in our experiences with just a single beta MAXX card we didn't find that to be the case.

We didn't concentrate long on the overclocking potential of the MAXX for this particular article, simply because of its early status. Once we review a retail board in December, you can bet we'll be whipping out dual-peltier elements to supercool the two MAXX chips and really go for some numbers.

The ATi Rage Fury MAXX we tested is still in a Beta form. Its drivers will continue to mature on the way to its launch date in December. We're not sure exactly how much more performance will be squeezed from the MAXX's drivers as the card seems to be pretty solid in that department already.

Likewise, the drivers of the high-technology GeForce256 chip will also continue to mature, and could also bring gains in performance with them as NVIDIA's engineers optimize more of their new thoroughbred's raw potential.

It seems that the MAXX is clearly being positioned as a card that will rain performance benefits down on its buyers in the games and titles of today, like Unreal Tournament, Quake3: Arena and others, as well as titles that appear over the next three to six months that take advantage of DX7's Texture Compression routines.