Overclocking
To test the overclocking potential of these two boards, we'll be sticking with Doom 3, running the same timedemo at 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering to give us a far more GPU-limited situation and thus see the true ability of these boards when overclocked. Of course, as always it should be remembered that the overclocks achieved here are only those seen on the samples used for review, and thus are not necessarily indicative of every board of this ilk on the market.
Let's start with the A400 Ultra TDH, which managed a pretty
impressive overclock of 42MHz on the core, up to 442MHz from the stock
400. There was less headroom in the RAM, which we could only push
up 25MHz to 575MHz (1.15GHz effective) from the stock speed of 550MHz
(1.1GHz effective). Let's see how this increase translated into
performance gains:
Our overclock here gave us close to an extra 5 frames per second at our chosen settings - Not something to be sniffed at at all, and a most welcome improvement.
Now on to the real star of the show in the overclocking stakes - Just by looking at the dual-slot cooling on the A400 GT TDH, I had high hopes for the overclockability of this board, and I wasn't disappointed. From it's default core clock of 350MHz, we managed to reach a stable overclock of 430MHz - That's an increase of 80MHz! Our attempts at overclocking the RAM yielded equally impressive results, reaching 575MHz (The same overclock as the Ultra) from its default 500MHz, meaning a 75MHz increase on the RAM clocks too. We can see just what this meant for the boards performance below.
The large clock jump takes our A400 GT beyond the
performance garnered by the A400 Ultra at stock by a couple of frames
per second, and represents an increase of close to 7 FPS overall - A
fantastic result if you ask me!
