Asus EAH5870 Radeon HD 5870 Review

Name: Asus EAH5870 Radeon HD 5870 Review - Page 9
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 02:00 PM EDT

For our next set of performance metrics, we spent some time overclocking the Asus EAH5870 using the Overdrive utility built into ATI's Catalyst drivers and using Asus' SmartDoctor utility, which gives users the ability to tweak not only clock speeds, but the GPU voltage as well.

Overclocking The Asus EAH5870

Pedal To The Metal

Without any voltage modifications, we were able to overclock the Asus EAH5870 to a respectable and fully stable 900MHz / 1.29GHz. That was basically the upper limits of what Overdrive could do, before Asus sent over an update for the card's BIOS. With the card flashed to the shipping BIOS and using SmartDoctor to alter the GPU voltage, however, we were able to take the card much higher. With a bump in GPU voltage to 1.35v, we took the Asus EAH5870 all the way up to a 1GHz GPU clock with 1.3GHz memory.

While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of benchmarks and realized a marked improvement in performance. ET:QW showed the larger gain, but L4D was mostly CPU limited, hence the smaller increase in performance.

Tags: Asus, Radeon, DirectX, graphics, GPU, 5870

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