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 843 MHz Core (9 % overclock) and 1152 MHz Memory (2 % overclock). While the core overclock is ok for a new product, the memory seems to be quite limited. With 0.8 ns chips installed on the board I was expecting a higher frequency here. Also it has to be mentioned that a BIOS bug exists in the first batches of 3870 cards that will not allow core clock adjustments above 846 MHz. To fix this a new BIOS has been released, which is available here. For the record, the HD 3850 cards are affected too, but since it's almost impossible to reach such clock speeds with those cards it is not much of an issue.


While the idle temperature is certainly fine, 88°C on load is a bit high for my liking, so I'm sure we will see cards with improved coolers soon.