Overclocking and noise
OverclockingThe usual caveats apply when we talk about overclocking. 2 cards from the company may overclock to significantly differing levels. It can be just a case of being lucky or unlucky. Overclocking was conducted by running Far Cry at our maximum image quality setting of 1600x1200 4x AA 8x AF. An overclock was deemed successful if the entire test passed without any graphical artifacts.
I managed a rock-steady overclock of 513MHz core and 1040MHz memory. The card would go higher, of course, for one-off benchmarking, but I felt as if these overclocked frequencies could be used on a permanent basis.
Far Cry was re-run at maximum settings and with an overclocked Crucial X800 PRO card.
A decent enough rise such that it puts Crucial's card within touching distance of NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra. Notice just how much of a lead the 16-pipe XT PE still pulls out over a 12-pipe card that's clocked to similar levels.
Noise
Thanks to its use of a reference R420 cooler, the card was quiet at all times other than prolonged load. Even then, it's still a few notches below any 6800-series card from NVIDIA. No complaints here.
