Legit Video Card Reviews
AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Product: | AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 |
| Date: | Thu, Oct 21, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Overclocking
To overclock the AMD Radeon HD 6800 graphics card series, we used the ATI Overdrive utility that is part of the CATALYST Control Center. When you 'unlock' the ATI Overdrive, you can manually set the clock and memory settings or let the 'auto-tune' utility set the frequencies for you.
Just for fun, we tried out the auto-tune feature to see if it could really find a stable clock configuration, and it worked in about 15 minutes and did not lock up the system. This utility determines the highest core and memory clock frequency that is stable and shows you what the GPU temperature is and how much load the GPU is under during testing.
Before Auto-tune was run we started out at the default settings of 775MHz on the core and 1000MHz on the memory and was able to reach 840MHz on the core and 1130MHz on the GDDR5 memory. We know auto-tune is a little conservative, so we manually bumped it up another 10MHz and was able to reach 850MHz on the core clock and 1140MHz on the memory. This is a 75MHz overclock on the core and a 140MHz boost on the GDDR5 memory ICs.
To test out the overclock we fired up 3DMark Vantage to see what this overclock was like.
The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Stock 775MHz/1000MHz:
The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Overclocked 850MHz/1140MHz:
Running 3DMark Vantage with the Extreme preset we got a
score of X6063. The score went up X6623 3DMarks when overclocked, which
was an improvement of 9.2% with this mild overclock. Let's see how the AMD Radeon HD 6870 overclocked using the same methods.
The AMD Radeon HD 6870 comes with a 900MHz core clock and 1050MHz memory clock. We ran auto-tune on this card and the program came back saying that it was able to reach 940MHz on the core clock and 1140MHz on the memory. This is a 40MHz overclock on the core and a 90MHz boost on the GDDR5 memory ICs.
To test out the overclock we fired up 3DMark Vantage to see what this overclock was like.
The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Stock 900MHz/1050MHz:
The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Overclocked 940MHz/1140MHz:
Running 3DMark Vantage with the Extreme preset we got a
score of X7645. The score went up X8099 3DMarks when overclocked, which
was an improvement of 6% with this easy to do overclocking method. Seeing a nice 6-9% performance gain with pretty much zero effort was nice to see and when we have more time we are sure these cards could be pushed even harder!
Next Page - Final Thoughts and Conclusions
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - AMD's 2nd Generation DX11 Video Card - Radeon 6800
Page 2 - 6800 Strategy, Pricing, and a peek at the 6900 series Page 3 - Stereoscopic 3D, HDMI 1.4, Eyefinity and More Page 4 - The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Page 5 - The AMD Radeon HD 6870 Page 6 - The Test System Page 7 - Aliens vs. Predator Page 8 - Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY Page 9 - Just Cause 2 Page 10 - Metro 2033 Page 11 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Page 12 - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Page 13 - 3DMark Vantage Page 14 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11 Page 15 - FurMark 1.8.2 Page 16 - Temperature Testing Page 17 - Power Consumption Page 18 - Overclocking Page 19 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
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