Legit Video Card Reviews
ASUS ARES 4GB Limited Edition Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | ASUS |
| Product: | ARES/2DIS/4GD5 |
| Date: | Wed, Jul 07, 2010 - 11:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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ASUS ARES Overclocking
Overclocking the ASUS ARES graphics card with Smart Doctor
was very easy as all we needed to do was pick some settings and hit apply!
ASUS did give us some pointers on how to overclock their ARES video card, so we'll share those with you before we go any further.
When attempting to overclock the ASUS ARES card, we recommend the following:
1. Scale the GPU frequency in increments of 10 without first adjusting the voltage or fan speed.
2. Once the card will not scale further, we highly suggest switching from auto fan mode to either manual or temperature based scaling. In our internal testing we found that keeping consistent temperatures under 75C will improve OC scaling before adding additional voltage. An example would be applying a GPU frequency of 930 but it is not stable after a few minutes of testing, at that point adjust the manual fan setting in Smart Doctor 60% or 65% or use the temperature option to automatically ramp the fan speed to the medium setting at 60C and the fast setting to 70C.
3. Depending upon the overclocking capabilities of the GPUs, we recommend setting GPU voltage to 1.225V~1.275V in the 950MHz to 980MHz range. Manually adjusting the fan speed or using the temperature based option may be required also. Once voltages hit 1.275V, we highly suggest disabling the auto fan mode and dial in a fan setting (manual/temperature) that works properly for your card. Generally a manual fan setting of 70% ~ 75% is required or setting the temperature based option to scale to the fast setting at 70C and fastest setting at 80C with fan speeds set to increase at the medium setting around 60C.
4. Frequencies exceeding 980MHz may/will require GPU voltage set at 1.300V to 1.325V with fan settings at 75% or higher. However, we noticed that voltage settings above 1.300V generally do not improve overclock scaling, especially with air cooling and even manually setting the fan speed above 80%. 5. These recommendations are based on Furmark 1.82 testing. Actual application and game testing will require (sometimes noticeably) lower voltage and fan speeds at like clock speeds.
Let's take a look at the stock clock settings and then try to overclock the ASUS ARES!
The ASUS ARES starts off life with both of the Radeon HD 5870 GPUs running at 850MHz on the core and 1200MHz on the memory. We were able to bump that up to 900MHz on the core and 1250MHz on the memory with no voltage adjustments. The performance gains were rather impressive.
The ASUS ARES went from X14827 to X16553 by just bumping up the clock speeds 50MHz! This is an increase of 1726 3DMarks or roughly 11.5%! Not bad from a 6% overclock on each core. We pushed the core and memory clocks up to 950MHz and 1275MHz next, but found the 3DMark score was still around X16500! It looks like we are CPU bound by the non-overclocked Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition processor!
Next Page - Final Thoughts and Conclusions
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - The ASUS ARES Limited Edition GPU
Page 2 - A Closer Look at ARES Page 3 - The History Behind ASUS ARES Page 4 - ARES Retail Box and Bundle Page 5 - The ASUS Smart Doctor Utility Page 6 - ASUS ARES Test Settings Page 7 - Batman: Arkham Asylum Page 8 - Resident Evil 5 Page 9 - Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. Page 10 - 3DMark Vantage Page 11 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11 Page 12 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Page 13 - Aliens vs. Predator Page 14 - FurMark 1.8.2 Page 15 - Power Consumption Page 16 - Temperature Testing Page 17 - ASUS ARES Overclocking Page 18 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
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