Radeon HD 3650 Showdown - ASUS vs. HIS
Further overclocking factory overclocked cards can get interesting, as the cards come with decent boosts in speeds right out of the box. It's sort of like taking a Ferrari, and then adding Nitrous tanks. All kidding aside, we went into the Overdrive section of ATI's Catalyst Control Center to see just how far we could push each card's GPU and memory speeds past the manufacturer's specs. The answers just might be a little surprising...
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The curious thing about Overdrive is that it typically offers you a range of speeds to choose from, and although both of these cards are based on the same GPU, the range shown differed. For example, when the ASUS card was installed, the highest speed available was 890 MHz. The same screen for the HIS IceQ Turbo showed 850 MHz. Raising speeds and testing along the way, we found that the highest stable speeds we arrived at were 875 MHz for the GPU and 970 MHz for the GDDR3 memory on the ASUS EAH3650 TOP and "only" 840 MHz / 990 MHz, respectively, with the HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo.
ASUS EAH3650 TOP Overclock - GPU=875 MHz, Memory=970 MHz
HIS HD 3650 IceQ Turbo Overclock - GPU=840 MHz, Memory=990 MHz
ASUS EAH3650 TOP Overclock - GPU=875 MHz, Memory=970 MHz
HIS HD 3650 IceQ Turbo Overclock - GPU=840 MHz, Memory=990 MHz
As one might expect, the higher GPU clock speed achieved when overclocking the ASUS EAH3650 TOP allowed it to rise to the top of each benchmark and best the HIS HD 3650 IceQ Turbo (these tests we not sensitive to frame buffer size). New frame rates for the ASUS card were just over 6% better in each game engine, which is obviously a good thing, yet the speeds we arrived at were closer to 10% higher than the originals. HIS saw approximately a 4% increase in performance, which is more in line with the 5% increase in GPU speed.
