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 725 MHz core (32% overclock) and 1080 MHz Memory (8% overclock). That's quite an impressive core overclock, especially for a passive card. The main reason for this spectacular result is that the Redwood GPU on the HD 5550 was originally designed for much higher clock speeds and only recently made its way into the lower end product segment.

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 25.1%.

Temperatures

Despite the passive heatsink the temperatures are low in all scenarios.

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.