AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 Performance Review

Name: AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 Performance Review - Page 9
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 12:01 AM EDT

We were curious to see how much frequency headroom the Radeon HD 5850 had left in the tank, with a 2.15 billion transistor, ultra-complex 40nm GPU under the hood. So, for our next set of performance metrics, we spent some time overclocking the new Radeon HD 5850 using the Overdrive utility built into ATI's Catalyst drivers.

Overclocking The Radeon HD 5850

Pedal To The Metal

Ultimately, we were able to take the Radeon HD 5850 up from its default GPU core and memory clock speeds of 725MHz and 1000MHz, respectively, to 765MHz and 1150MHz, increases of 40MHz and 150MHz. While the card was in its overclocked state, we re-ran a couple of benchmarks and saw modest performance improvements of about 4% (L4D) and 6% (ET:QW).

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, Gaming, DirectX, graphics, GPU, PCI Express, PCIe, dx11, Eyefinity

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com