Installation

There was no power connection on this card, so installation was as simple as it could possibly be. After securing the card in its slot with a screw, I proceeded to boot up the PC. The fan on the card, despite being small, is virtually silent – I could not hear it over the other fans I have in my PC. Next, I proceeded to install a fresh copy of Windows.

Once in Windows, I installed all appropriate drivers, as well as ATI Tool. I checked the clock speeds using ATI Tool, which showed up as 450 MHz for the core and 400 MHz for the memory. I inserted the BIOS flash CD into my DVD drive, and flashed the BIOS. Then I re-checked the clocks, and the core clock jumped up to 600MHz. A quick artifact scan showed no artifacts.

I was surprised to see no temp monitoring (and therefore no fan control). This would be a nice feature that Powercolor could add in future revisions perhaps.

Overclocking

First, it is necessary to be aware of the fact that the core of the card is pre-overclocked from the factory by a significant amount, so I did not expect any wonders from overclocking the card. I started bumping clock speeds, until I found a fully stable core clock value of 630MHz. We can look at this result from two views: the “450MHz” view, which gives us a grand overclock of 180MHz, or the “600 MHz” view, which gives us a overclock of 30 MHz. Overall, compared to the non overclocked factory core clock, we have an amazing overclock on the core. The memory overclock was much poorer though – only 9MHz, so a barely noticeable difference. Perhaps placing heat sinks on the memory modules would have helped.

Test System