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Overclocking the Diamond Stealth S80 |
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You
can't get something for nothing |
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Well, after seeing the
relatively poor performance in these benchmarks, we hoped to
squeeze out just a bit more performance by overclocking the
card. We started by raising the memory clock speeds
using the latest version of PowerStrip. Although we
had expected to raise the speed to at least 200MHz before
running into any issues (5ns memory rating should allow for
speeds up to 200MHz) we were not able to add more than 1MHz
before getting massive artifacting in any of our benchmarks.
Switching gears, we set the memory back to its default speed
and raised only the VPU core speed instead. It was a
"no-go" here as well, since it appears that this is another
clock-locked card. Using PowerStrip, we raised the
core speed from 200MHz all the way to the max setting
available (255MHz) with no discernible difference in the
benchmarks. We didn't get any crashes or lock-ups, but
we didn't get any increased performance either. Thus,
we could not get any benefits from overclocking the Diamond
Stealth S80 whatsoever.
| Our final
thoughts about the Stealth S80 are that you get what you
pay for. It's not for lack of Diamond's
manufacturing or expertise that the Stealth S80 suffered
so - if anything, it simply fails because of the chipset
that it was created on, that being the ATi Radeon
9200SE. The 9200SE is the lowest rung on ATi's
graphics ladder, and doesn't hold up well against the competition (incidentally,
Diamond also offers the Stealth S90, which is based on
the 5200 Ultra and only sells for about $10 more.)
Serious gamers will probably look elsewhere, but system
builders looking for an inexpensive means for providing
basic Windows acceleration and occasional gaming will
have no issue with laying out $49 for the Diamond
Stealth S80. We do expect for Diamond to show it's
real brilliance with the upcoming Viper line of cards,
based on more powerful GPUs, and will hopefully have
more information on them in the future. As for the
Stealth S80, we're giving it a
7
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