Asus AX800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro)
Overclocking the AX800 Pro
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Up to this point, it's obvious that the Asus AX800 Pro/TD, and the 16-pipe cards based on NVIDIA's NV4x architecture, are clearly superior to the previous generation's Radeon 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. There is no denying that these new cards are really fast, but as you all know, overclocking can bring even more performance...
In our initial look at the R420, our reference ATi Radeon X800 Pro overclocked fairly well, hitting top core and memory speeds of 520MHz / 525MHz, respectively (up from 475MHz / 450MHz). Asus' version of the X800 Pro was for more "overclocker friendly", however. Our AX800 Pro/TD maxed out at a peak core clock speed of 542MHz and maximum memory clock speed of 1.088GHz (544MHz DDR)! These increases equate to a 14.1% bump in the core's clock speed, and a 21% increase in the memory's clock speed. To demonstrate the benefit of overclocking the AX800 Pro/TD, we re-ran Aquamark 3 and Comanche 4 at 1600x1200, with 4X AA and 16X Anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. In Aquamark 3, we saw a 12.5% increase in performance and in Comanche 4, the AX800's frame-rate jumped by 8.4%.
