Sapphire Toxic X800 Pro ViVo
Overclocking
Even though Sapphire's APE software had the memory clocked at over 70 MHz over the standard speeds, we knew from experience that the real dividends come from raising the speed of the VPU as well. Sapphire knows this too, and their Redline Tweak software fits the bill nicely. It wouldn't be fair to note that this utility just allows for overclocking, since it actually does much, much more. However, for our purposes we stuck with the Overclocking tab where we could choose VPU and memory speeds and apply them on the fly.
With the memory speed already running higher than normal, we found that we could only get an additional 33MHz boost using the Redline tweak. More importantly, we were able to get the VPU up as high as 546MHz. Coupled with the 553 MHz that the memory was now running at we gave two of our benchmarks another go to see what kind of gains we would get. We increased our original scores in both tests without doing so much as dragging a slider bar in Redline. In particular, we gained an additional four frames per second in Aquamark, which equates to a 12% increase in performance, and just over two frames in Comanche 4, or about 4%. While we simply added to the already top score in Aquamark, we narrowed the gap in Comanche 4, finishing just behind the GeForce 6800 GT.
