Radeon HD 5970 Single card and Crossfire review - Overclocking & Tweaking

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 here. 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% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 30 to 50 MHz.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it ;)

All in all... do it at your own risk.

Above you can see the overclocked results for Resident Evil 5, same image quality settings as before, in 4xAA | DX10 mode. Light blue is the default test session we showed you, the upper dark blue line 5970 overclocked.

Now with a standard overclock you'll reach roughly 800 MHz on the core. However, if you pickup MSI's Afterburner, you'll notice a Voltage tweak options. I'm not saying you should use it as it's a little dangerous, but we dropped 1.3 Volts on the GPUs after which 900 MHz was stable.

Memory -- the card is equipped with 5000 MHz memory, clocked at 4000 MHz at default. We could not get it stable at 5000 MHz though and had to settle for 4800 MHz. Still  .. the end results above is a 17% faster performing card at 2560x1600.

The Radeon HD 5970 is very tweakable. Keep an eye on your GPU (now reaching 90 C) and VRM temps though.