Retail X700 Pro Roundup

Overclocking Comparison

Unfortunately, ATI doesn't have a utility on the level of NVIDIA's coolbit's registry tweak. We decided to use the ATI Tray Tool for our overclocking needs, as it has a built-in artifact tester. Now, I wouldn't trust it to find a final overclock speed, but it does a good job of finding a maximum from which to work down. The little 3D application just doesn't push the GPU enough to really make it fail if it's going to fail at a certain clock.

It's a little trickier to overclock ATI GPU's than NVIDIA's. Artifacts are harder to notice, and stability is more a question of whether you can get through a run without CPU recover kicking you out of your application. Regardless, we generally followed the same methodology that we used to overclock our 6600GTs.

The maximum overclock that we see is the PowerColor's 15.3% increase to 490MHz core clock speed. The 8.5% overclock of the ABIT 128MB card is less than what we expected to hit. We don't think that this was a temperature related issue, as the ABIT heatsink is heavy, mounted well, has a lot of surface area, and sounds like it moves plenty of air. Of course, if cooling was the only thing that mattered, the HIS card would have done better than PowerColor.


As far as memory clock goes, it looks like something between 980 and 990 is what we can expect to see from overclocked X700 cards. All of these cards would run at about 990, but we had to drop the frequency of the ABIT, HIS, and Sapphire cards in order to maintain stability over extended periods of operation.

It is interesting that the 2ns RAM can't quite reach 500MHz on ATI cards, but soars to 600MHz on NVIDIA cards in some cases. This indicates that ATI is pushing latencies first while NVIDIA is focusing on bandwidth.