Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB Ruby Edition Video Card

Overclocking

To overclock the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 512MB video card, we used ATI Overdrive 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 to set the frequencies for you. Just for fun, I tried out the auto-tune feature to see if it could really find a stable clock configuration for the Radeon 3850 HD and it worked this time! When the Radeon HD 3850 first came out the 7.10 and 7.11 drivers would lock up when using auto-tune, so it’s good to see that ATI has fixed this in the 8.1 drivers. Let’s see what the Diamond Radeon HD 3850 can do!

After ATI Overdrive finished, it showed the clock speeds being 710MHz on the GPU and 870MHz on the memory. This is a nice jump up from 670MHz/830MHz, which are the stock settings. Once I started to play games with these overclocked settings, the system was found to be stable. Not a massive overclock, but it’s good enough for a slight performance boost in games.