Overclocking

To be honest, I didn’t think that this card would overclock much, given its tiny cooler and no 6-pin connector.  But I was proved wrong as you will see in a few scrolls down.

Starting with a Furmark test running in the background, I started overclocking with Rivatuner, 15MHz at a time.  I kept on increasing the clocks until Furmark showed artifacts. The fan on the card was running at 100% (manually controlled).

Starting from the stock clocks of  600/1500/900 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory), I reached 716/1850/1107 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory).  That’s a 19.3/23.3/23 % overclock on Core/Shader/Memory. Pretty solid, I would say for such a small card.  This should help it get into 8800 GT/9800 GT performance territory.

One thing I would like to note here is that, this card lowers its clocks to 300/600/100 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory) in 2D Mode to achieve low power consumption.

Note that GPU-Z requests clocks from the driver, but Rivatuner’s Hardware Monitoring module requests clocks from the hardware itself which is accurate.  Thus GPU-Z clocks and Rivatuner clocks differ slightly.

Temperature and Power Consumption

To measure maximum temperature and power consumption, we again turn back to Furmark. Furmark represents the one of the most intensive tests a GPU can undertake. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark – knowing how hot your card can get and how much power it can consume.

The core voltage on the GPU  is lowered from 1.1V to 1V to save power.

Here are the settings used:

Note: AA is not used as it causes the cards to use less power. Power consumption is of the whole system.