Overclocking

To overclock the various X1900 XTX boards, we’re using the R5xx overclocking tool provided at driverheaven.net’s forums. It seems like there’s no perfect tool out there for overclocking the X1900 XT family, each software program has their fair share of compromises, but it seems to be the best tool out there for overclocking the X1900 XTX at the moment, providing manual clock speed adjustment as well as settings to adjust voltages as well as fan speeds. We followed the same procedure to overclock for all the cards in this roundup, manually cranking the fan’s RPMs to 3900 RPMs, while the graphics core voltage was adjusted to 1.225V, with memory voltage of 2.2V and I/O voltage set at 2.2V. From there we set out to hit the highest speeds possible:

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast – Direct3D

Notes

We actually got the Sapphire board to run some applications at even higher speeds than 702/837 without any artifacts, but the card wasn’t able stable enough to endure our looped 3DMark 06 runs without eventually crashing. Perhaps with a little more voltage and higher fan speeds we could have gotten the board to run with complete stability at these speeds, but we didn’t want to bend the rules to see if it were possible. Of course, we’re also running with one board from each manufacturer, that’s nowhere near a large enough representative sample to come to any conclusions on which manufacturers boards overclock the best (remember that they’re all basically the same board anyway), we’re just providing these results so you can see how well the X1900 XTX scales at higher clock speeds.