Overclocking

Overclocking results listed in this section are achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. We choose this approach as it is the most realistic scenario for the majority of users.

Every sample overclocks differently, which is why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.



If you plan on doing any overclocking, you will have to increase the card's power limit or the card will always run below 1000 MHz. All our OC testing is done with a power limit setting of +50%, the maximum, to avoid the way in which AMD's card limits power draw.

Maximum overclock of our sample is 1060 MHz on the GPU, a 6% overclock; GPU overclocking potential is quite slim. Memory doesn't overclock much better, reaching 565 MHz, a 13% increase. The biggest performance gain is achieved by increasing the power limit as additional clock increases only yield small performance improvements.

Important: Each GPU (including each GPU of the same make and model) will overclock slightly
differently based on random production variances. This table just serves to provide a list of typical
overclocks for similar cards, determined during TPU review.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies, we ran a quick test of Battlefield 3 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


Actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 12.4%.