ATI Radeon HD 5830 Review

Overclocking

For a long time now, enthusiasts have been upping the clock speeds on their cards to either equal or best the more expensive, higher-performing models. I am a part of that group and I usually seek to extract as much performance as I can get out of my hardware.

Overclocking was a bit tricky because the usual method of overclocking a card like this didn’t go the way I liked. That method would be to use the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) to enable ATI Overdrive and then overclock to high heaven. This proved useful but was not the extreme overclocking I was looking for.

The CCC allowed me to stably hit the pre-defined maximums of 875MHz on the core and 1200MHz (4800MHz effective) on the memory. After not being satisfied, I then decided to find some other means to boost my clocks, which is when I turned to the MSI AfterBurner utility.

I was yet again disappointed to find out that this only allowed me the same maximums as the ATI Overdrive did. A bit annoyed now, I decided it was time to start tweaking. I did some research and then some digging around in the configuration files for the utility and came across a solution. Look for a follow-up article detailing this in the near future.

After doing all my testing I finally achieved a maximum overclock (on stock voltage) of 950MHz on the core, an 18.75% increase, and 1300MHz (5200MHz effective) on the memory, a 30% increase. Very impressive! Here is the GPU-Z screenshot and the validation can be found here.

Now for a few benches to compare and demonstrate the benefit of such a hefty overclock. The memory bandwidth was never really in question and as such its 30% overclock was merely extra headroom rather than an actual factor in the resulting performance. The 18.75% core overclock has the most impact. Here are a few benches I reran, showing improvements in excess of 15%.

So 17.13% increase on average in some of these benches really isn’t bad for an 18.75% overclock. However, bear in mind that overclocking has its cons as well. Increased temperatures and power usage are the first to come to mind. Also, there is the possibility of shortening the life of your card. I noticed temperatures go up to 89°C and total system power draw peak very briefly at about 566W while running FurMark. Regular gaming did not push the card that hard, so not to worry (too much).

Not all benches showed such large gains but there are several factors to consider why this is so. That is a whole other story which I will not delve into at this time. However, I’m pleased to say that overclocking the HD 5830 is rather easy and it responds very, very well.