ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670

Name: ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670 - Page 11
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, November 15, 2007, 12:00 AM EDT

For our next set of performance metrics, we spent some time overclocking the new Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850 cards, using the Overdrive utility built into ATI's Catalyst drivers.

A New Overdrive Menu

As you can see, the latest revision of Overdrive is a vast improvement over previous offerings. This revision of Overdrive now gives users the ability to individually overclock cards when running in CrossFire configurations. It also has a new built-in test, wider frequency ranges, as well as GPU activity and temperature monitors.

Overclocking the Radeon HD 3870 and 3850

(Fast 3D Video Cards) + Overclocking = Even Faster Cards

To find the Radeon HD 3870's and 3850's peak core and memory frequencies, we slowly raised their respective sliders until we begun to see visual artifacts on-screen while running a game or benchmark, or until our test system was no longer stable

Radeon HD 3870 (Overclocked): GPU=845MHz, Memory=1186MHz
Radeon HD 3850 (Overclocked): GPU=770MHz, Memory=1040MHz

Radeon HD 3870 (Overclocked): GPU=845MHz, Memory=1186MHz
Radeon HD 3850 (Overclocked): GPU=770MHz, Memory=1040MHz

Ultimately, we were able to take the Radeon HD 3870 up from its stock GPU and memory clock speeds of 777MHz and 1126MHz to 845MHz and 1186MHz, respectively. The Radeon HD 3850 went from 670MHz (GPU) and 830MHz (Memory) to 770MHz and 1040MHz. While both cards were overclocked, we re-ran a couple of high-resolution benchmarks and saw significant increases across the board.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, Radeon HD, ATI Radeon, and

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