Overclocking

ATI's new HD 38xx Series implements only very limited voltage control. Basically the voltages can be set up to 1.3V in several steps. With a default of around 1.2V to 1.25V there is not much to be gained here. A future ATITool version will let you set those voltages.

We used ATITool to manually search for the maximum core and memory clocks.



The final overclocks of our card are 749 MHz Core (4 % overclock) and 945 MHz Memory (5 % overclock). This is better than the GeCube card we have but still not as far as the more extreme people would want. Since both HD3850 and HD3870 use the same ASICs it makes sense that ATI bins their chips so that ones with a lower maximum clock are used on the 3850 cards.
If you take those overclocks in comparison to the AMD reference design which has 670 MHz core and 828 MHz memory the overclocks are much better already with 12% and 14%.


The fan on the Powercolor HD 3850 Xtreme does at great job at keeping the card cool, even under load and additional overclocking the temperatures were in the 50° range.