Overclocking
OverclockingOverclocking a passively-cooled card without adequate auxillary cooling is a business fraught with danger. We simply had to overclock the card as it used an R480 core, so we added a couple of 80mm fans, spinning at 2,500RPM, situated around the card. Of course, adding fans to a passive design is against the card's raison d'etre, but it's always interesting to see just how far past the rated specs. samples go. The additional cooling dropped load temperatures from around 100c to a 'mere' 65c.
That's the rather impressive result from the air-cooled, albeit indirectly, SAPPHIRE X800 GTO Ultimate 256MB card. DOOM 3 and Far Cry were re-run, with the overclocked card, to see what effect it had on results at 1280x1024 4x AA/8x AF.
It's interesting to note that the overclocked X800 GTO 256MB card outbenchmarks a stock-clocked X800 XL 256MB card, clocked in at 400MHz core and 980MHz RAM. Of course, it has a full 16-pipe rendering setup, too.
