Asus Extreme Radeon AX800XL/2DTV
Overclocking the Asus AX800XL
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Using PowerStrip, we started raising the speed on the VPU and RAM to see how far we could push it. Since the memory was already running close to rated speeds (972MHz compared to the 1GHz rating of Samsung chips) we didn't expect too much on that end, so we focused more on the core. Our final stable overclock was 436MHz on the VPU and 548MHz (1.1GHz effective) for the RAM. These were decent gains, yet not nearly as high as what we saw with Sapphire's X800 XL card a few weeks back. To see how this affected overall performance, we went back to Doom 3 and Aquamark 3 and re-ran them at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8x Aniso:
We saw nominal gains in each benchmark: about 7 percent in Aquamark and 10 percent in Doom 3, right on par with the overclock of 9 percent on the VPU (436MHz over the stock speed of 398MHz). The increase in memory speeds helped just slightly, as we saw little difference in the frame rates when increasing or decreasing the memory clock only. As far as making comparisons to the competition, the X800 XL simply increased its already large lead over the GeForce 6800GT in Aquamark 3, yet still couldn't quite catch the NVIDIA card in Doom 3.
