Sapphire Radeon X800 XT - PCI Express

Name: Sapphire Radeon X800 XT - PCI Express - Page 13
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, November 17, 2004, 10:00 PM EDT

Overclocking The Sapphire Radeon X800 XT

Making the Fast, Faster...

Armed with the latest copy of PowerStrip, we set out to overclock the Sapphire Radeon X800 XT. Due to the fact that this card is not a "Platinum Edition", its default core and memory clock speeds are programmed for 500MHz / 500MHz respectively. Considering that Radeon X800 XT Platinum Editions are clocked at 520MHz (core) / 560MHz (memory), and this card technically uses the same GPU and memory, we were hoping to hit at least these clock speeds...

We slowly turned up the core and memory clock speeds on our Sapphire Radeon X800 XT sample until our test system was not longer stable. In the end we were able to hit a maximum core clock speed of 533MHz and a peak memory clock speed of 574MHz - a few ticks higher than a stock Platinum Edition. We then re-ran the high-resolution Aquamark 3 and Doom 3 tests , with AA and aniso enabled, to see just how much the increased clocks affected performance. We ended up gaining about 3 frames per second in Aquamark 3 (8%) and about 5 FPS in Doom 3 (14.2%).

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, PC, Pre, PCI Express, XP, pci, SAP, express, XT, X8, AP

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