overclocking 4870 xf

Is it worth the trouble to overclock a pair of 4870's on a R2. Would there be a noticeable improvement in games or would it only be a benchmark thing?

Thanks,

 

There would be a good increase in benches and a little increase in games. Without raising the voltage, you cannot go higher than about 610 on the core - at least that has been my observation so far.

 

how about the memory clock scook ?

 

Hmm, I had mine clocked up to about 640, but it didn't take well to overvolting, I had a lot of stuttering. but yea, stable maybe the 600 range.

 

That 600-610 was with stock voltage. Overvolted I can do 685 lol

And as for memory, for my everyday OC I did 610/1000 I believe. I do not know if the gpu voltage equates to more memory voltage or not. You may be able to do 1100 on the memory at stock voltage, I didn't check. Long story short....I only bother overclocking for benches. The machine can run any game at stock speeds perfectly satisfactorily.

 

yeah, i've been playing SC2 and started thinking about overclocking
But i think that CPU overclocking might help me more in that case.

 

is it bogging down? if not why bother overclocking at all?

 

well i could always raise some video settings if i have some spare power

 

I would have thought you could already run it all on ultra?

 

No way. All on ultra wouldn't move..
Do you play it?

 

I have it but have not played yet. I bought it then realized I wanted to replay all of SC1 and Brood War lol, just finished the Brood War terran campaign last night so just zerg to go then SC2 time. I did not realize I had this much self control.....lol

If it does slow down my laptop.....well, I have a desktop with an i7 965 and 2 5870s lol....I will MAKE it run smooth on all ultra

 

Hehe, nice! Yeah, if you want to play on ultra you gonna have to play on the desktop.

 

That was about where mine capped. Raising the voltage got me stable up to 650 in games, I can finish Vantage at 700 (sometimes), I also never see temps over 70 or so during games and dont even hit 80 with furmark. I still think they are limited by voltage, but I see no way to get them over 1.15

 

definitely a voltage limit on these cards

I can verify this as I ran mine in a chest freezer and still topped out around 700 lol

That and the desktop cores can do about 900 MHz....same chips almost

 

I know....old thread. But I have a question. I was gonna overclock(just for bragging rights-benchmarks) and I used AMD GPU Tool. Well when I looked at the first card, the clocks are 550 and 888 default. OK. But the secondary card is 250 and 200 default and can't be changed. Is that normal?

 

Yeh depending on the driver version GPU clock tool might not work sometimes. Best way to OC the GPUs especially AMD ones is to flash them. I remember OCing Nvidia ones with System tools. So so much easier. Works fine always too with any driver update. AMD/ATi should really do the same. It would be awesome. They have a few tools out but they don't last or work for long after newer driver updates or new GPUs come out.

Cheers.

 

'Twould be nice. I found a thread here that explained how to with RivaTuner really well. So that's what I am using.

 

AMD clock tool doesnt work with any driver greater than 10.5a fyi.