ATI Drivers: We Know to Overclock Graphics Cards

As soon as Catalyst driver version 3.8 came out, you could notice not only a few smaller enhancements in the 3D graphics page, but also a new SMARTSHADER Effects page where you could enable post-processing of the 3D application images, and an OVERDRIVE page, which we would like to draw your attention to:

When you enable the Overdrive function, the driver automatically increases the ATI RADEON 9800 XT graphics processor frequency. If the core is no warmer than 52^oC (the R360 chip features a built-in thermal diode), the frequency rises up to 432MHz. If the temperature increases even more but doesn’t reach 62^oC, the new frequency will make 418MHz. When the graphics chip gets warmer than that, the frequency will automatically drop down to the nominal value.

In order to avoid system reboots in case the graphics card “freezes dead”, because of the graphics chip overheating, for instance, you can enable VPU RECOVER feature:

In this case if the core stops responding to the driver requests, the driver will reinitialize the graphics processor.

So, 418MHz and 432MHz during dynamic overclocking. Is this a significant frequency increase or a small one? Relative to the nominal GPU frequency of 412MHz, these values are equal to 1.5% and 4.9% respectively.

Well, overclocking is a useful thing, of course, but the maximum of 5% is too little, really. I think that if there are such nice hardware monitoring options, the ability to restore the default nominal frequencies in case of overheating and reinitialize the VPU in case of emergency, the frequencies could really be increased much farther beyond 5%. Especially, since we know that R350 chips and evidently, R360 chips too, boast excellent overclocking potential and 20% frequency increase, which turns into 40% once you apply extreme overclocking methods is far not the top of their ability (see our article called Extreme Overclocking Experience: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra against ATI RADEON 9800 Pro).

When we tested ATI RADEON 9800 XT, we decided not to use the OVERDRIVE function, although we liked the idea of dynamic overclocking a lot. As a result, we tested this graphics card at the nominal frequencies. Why? Because those of you who plan to overclock this card, will hardly bee happy with a 5% frequency increase. And those who simply select a specific menu item in the control panel will hardly notice any real performance improvement.