On
Wednesday we brought you our first look at the X1800
technology in the form of a preview detailing the
performance and features. In the past few days we’ve
been delving deeper into the feature set and performance
of the card and hope to bring you some very interesting
comparisons over the next few weeks.
We thought
it was about time there was some overclocking tests
supplied to the public so with that in mind we got
our hands on just about the only tool that allows
you to overclock the X1800XT direct from ATI
and pushed this beast as high as it would go without
any modifications.
Test Systems and benchmarking comments
X1800XT:
AMD Athlon64 FX55 CPU
2x512mb DDR 3200 (2-2-2-5)
Samsung 80Gb 7200rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Ultra Xconnect 500w PSU
ATI Reference Crossfire Motherboard
Windows XP
SP2
.Net FW 1.1 sp1
Catalyst WHQL (X1800XT specific drivers)
Doom3
The test system
was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive
was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed.
Following the completion of the installation, the
ATI drivers were installed. The only updates applied
were SP2 and .NET Framework 1.1(latest service pack).
Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools
were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented.
For each test, the ATI drivers were set to default
quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).
Good
Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times
and the median result for each resolution/setting
is shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications
had their latest patches applied.
Overclocking
the XT
At the moment there are not any readily available
tools which allow you to overclock the X1800 (or any
R5xx card) however we were able to get our hands on
a tool created by ATI which allows us to configure
the clocks on the card.
With this in
hand we started up from the default clocks of 625/1500
and aimed for the relatively safe 650/1600. At 650/1610
all was well, no graphical anomalies etc so next stop
was 678/1700 (yes we were feeling adventurous!)
Running through
a few loops of 3dmark and Doom3 showed no issues at
these speeds so off we went again and tried 700/1700.
This time though we ended up with VPU recover kicking
in. After some playing around with smaller increments
we found the card was completely stable at 685/1700
but would run for an extended time at 690/1700.
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