Heat considerations, overclocking
Heat considerationsWith vGuru, ABIT allows the user to set a fan speed of slow (2,300RPM), medium (3,300RPM), and fast (4,200RPM). With this in mind, we loaded up RTHDRIBL, to see just how the GPU would get, when run with the XTurbo setting's 1.35v. RTHDRIBL was run for 10 minutes with each fan setting.
Ambient temperature was a toasty 26C. The board was perfectly stable at the near-silent 2,300RPM setting, suggesting that gamers with an ear for quietness may opt for a basic XTurbo speed that's accompanied by literally no card noise.
Overclocking
Voltage and fan adjustments beg you to overclock the card further. Setting the fan speed to high and raising core and RAM voltages to 1.40v and 2.1v, respectively, we used ATI Tool to see just how high the card would go. Core artifacts were present at just 445MHz core, or 25MHz above ABIT's XTurbo setting. Similarly, we saw a number of sparklies, a tell-tale sign of RAM corruption, at 1150MHz.
440MHz core and 1140MHz RAM, then, was our best stable effort, offering scant performance gains above the card's XTurbo mode. We re-ran DOOM 3 and Far Cry, both at 1600x1200 4x AA 8x AF.
As you can see, the extra clock speed isn't enough to beat out an ATI Radeon X850 XT 256MB card.
