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 970 MHz core (11% overclock) and 1370 MHz Memory (12% overclock). It seems that most recently produced Cypress cores can hit between 950 and 1000 MHz. The overclocks seen on our card are neither spectacular nor disappointing, they pretty much represent a good average of what you can expect from most HD 5800 based graphics cards.

I would also like to point out that the CCC Overdrive limits are set too low to be able to reach a maximum overclock using CCC as only overclocking tool.

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 6.2%.

Temperatures

Temperatures are really low. Since the fan is fairly noisy I would have preferred to see higher temperatures here in return for less fan noise.

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.