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 770 MHz core (10% overclock) and 1440 MHz Memory (25% overclock). To be honest, I'm quite surprised to see even that much overclocking. While not much, it is still good to see that the card can handle it despite being completely fanless.

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 11.1%.

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.

When installing the card in your system, it is best to monitor temperatures using GPU-Z or any other monitoring tool, and then stress the card for about half an house using Furmark or similar. If the temperatures do not reach 90°C you should be fine with the current setup, if you go above 90°C add a slow running fan or point and existing one to the VGA card area to add some 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.