Legit Reviews

The Catalyst Control Center locks the maximum overclock (of all ATI cards) to whatever is preset for a max regardless of application used, so with MSI Afterburner v1.60 I went into the configuration file and edited the following value from 0 to 1 to enable limitless overclocks when in MSI Afterburner. Of course the maximum stable overclock is still dependent on the specific video card used and the config modification may not help whatsoever but in many cases it allows higher clocks on the memory or core or both.

For all Radeon HD 5670's CCC locks overclocks to a max of 850MHz/1050MHz which is a decent amount on the core clock but is a bit small for the VRAM clocks (50MHz max where, lets say, the HD 5750 can overclock by a stable ~275MHz). Perhaps I am a bit ambitious thinking I'd get more, but I only got up to a stable 830MHz / 1075MHz. The configuration mod gained me an extra 25MHz over the max of 1050MHz in CCC but the VRAM is rated for what it is already set to(1000MHz or 4GHz effective) so there's not much give there (using the HD 5770 as an example, the memory IC's are rated for 1250MHz or 5GHz effective and the card by default is below the rated spec, at 1200MHz or 4.8GHz effective so it takes a 50MHz bump to simply get it to rated speeds not to mention clocks on top of that).

Anyway here you have the overclock that I was able to achieve, not the greatest but it is what it is. Lets check out our gains from that quick overclock.

When comparing the overclocked card to itself at stock, you can see that across the board gains are minimal at best. On average the gain was just over 1FPS which is not enough to put it above any other card in any test really which is why I have the chart laid out this way. All the games tested at the overclock picked up 1FPS with most of the benchmarks picking up 2FPS if not one.

For those that are concerned with 3DMARK Vantage, I was able to run the benchmark at 850MHz / 1050MHz. To remind you, the stock score was 5232 and 6032 3DMarks for GPU and overall score respectively. The overclock scores were 5648 and 6408 3DMarks again for GPU and overall score respectively. A pickup of 416 3DMarks on the GPU score is nice but we all know the overclock doesn't really make a difference in normal use so lets move on.