ATI's Catalyst 3.8 Drivers: ATI Sanctioned Overclocking

Turning up the Heat

With any system that involves overclocking (factory regulated or otherwise), we are going to want to know it’s stable. To try to push the system, we ran the Final Fantasy XI benchmark on a loop for about 2 hours, followed by a run of X2 at the highest settings possible, then we hit it with GunMetal and finished off with TRAOD.

Tomb Raider is our most intensive test here, as when all the options are set all the way up, with no compression on anything, 6x AA, at 1800x1440 we squeeze out just about 9 frames per second.

Everything ran smoothly and beautifully. There were no stability issues or problems with the graphics.

Of course, that brings us to the next question we have to ask. Since the card overclocks itself based on heat, how does it respond when we heat it up?

To test this, we ran our "kill -9" TRAOD test a couple times to raise the temperature of the card as high as we know how to get it without a blow torch. We then reran the Aquamark3 and Unreal benchmarks. Here's what we saw:

The Aquamark3 score dropped from 47.62 to 46.78

The Unreal score dropped from 135.42 to 132.47

Of course, the performance should never drop below that of the stock clock speed, as the chip will never clock it self that lower than that. What this does mean is that as you are playing a graphically intensive game, your cards performance increase from overdrive will degrade over time.