Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.



The overclocks of our card are 765 MHz core (18% overclock) and 850 MHz Memory (6% overclock). For a completely passive card this overclock is decent, yet not too spectacular. But let's face it, for a card in this performance class overclocking does not make much sense.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 11.8%.

Temperatures

I installed the card in our VGA test case, which is a normal full size ATX case with one case side open. There are no case fans, and the only source of air movement is the CPU cooler. As you can see, the card shows excellent temperatures, which are perfectly safe. Remember, this was without any case fan. Just to be safe, when installing any passive card in your system, monitor the temperatures for a few hours over your typical load scenarios to get a feeling whether you need additional airflow.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.
The following table lists the clock settings for major performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that we measured. We measure on the pins of a coil or capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.


AMD includes their own overclocking utility with Catalyst Control Center. While easy to use, it also limits the maximum overclock to a predefined limit in the BIOS. This limit may vary from vendor to vendor or product to product. Following are the upwards limits for overclocking CCC gives you.