Overclocking the Radeon HD 4890

This week the Radeon HD 4890 was released by ATI and as our reference article showed, it has a lot of overclocking potential. I mean seriously, it has a lot of headroom there which could results in 10% better performance on average.

Typically overclocking can be managed really well through the Catalyst control center, however .. the control center always has certain restriction as in 'how much' you can actually overclock. In this article we'll show you how you can overclock the easy way, with the help of this little application we make ourselves, Rivatuner.

This article is really simple as all we'll show you is, how to manage an overclock; and of course throw in a couple of additional benchmarks.

Overclocking & Tweaking
As most of you with most videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.

What do we need?
One of the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download from our website. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.

Where should we go?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% (in total) of the core and memory clock MHz.

Next page please, where we'll learn you to overclock the proper way.