System setup, notes and overclocking
Hardware and Software
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Winchester) @ 2.55GHz |
| Motherboard | ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe, BIOS 1013 |
| Memory | 2x512MiB Corsair XMS3200XL |
| HyperTransport clock | 255MHz x 4 |
| Memory timings | 2.5-2-2-5 2T @ 425MHz |
| Graphics Card #1 | PowerColor X850 Pro (507/1040 & 615/1080) |
| Graphics Card #2 | XFX GeForce 6800 GT (350/1000 & 400/1080) |
| Disk subsystem | 3x 80GB Seagate 7200.7 in NVIDIA SATA RAID-0 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Pro SP2 |
| Graphics Drivers | ForceWare 77.77 for NVIDIA hardware Catalyst 5.8 for ATI hardware |
Tests
Futuremark 3DMark05 Build 1.2.0 - 0xAA 0xAF & 4xAA 8xAF
DOOM 3 v1.3 - Timedemo 1 - 0xAA 8xAF & 4xAA 8xAF
Half-Life 2 - custom HEXUS benchmark - 0xAA 0xAF & 4xAA 8xAF
This is another snapshot review, so as with our recent PixelView GeForce 7800 GTX review, we're going with a fairly small test set. We're not all lucky enough to have TFTs that can handle 1600x1200 resolution, so 1280x1024 remains the max res for these tests. All image quality settings were applied within the individual applications, leaving the graphics drivers at default settings.
Overclocking
If you paid close attention to the system specs you will see that a 108MHz overclock of the GPU was achieved, while the RAM was taken up a slightly more modest 40MHz. We were slightly skeptical of the core overclock that we achieved, but after some application cross-checking and performance increase analysis we can say that we did indeed successfully clock this R480 core up to 615MHz. Here's a pic of the core, for those of you who might take interest in what's etched onto it.
It was interesting to sit and watch ATITool work its magic, wondering quite when it would hit the ceiling. Just beyond 615MHz we hit system crash territory. The case in which the card was tested does draw in air from the bottom straight onto the card, with a large, slow spinning 12cm fan. So, the card had plenty of cool air.
The card successfully completed the set of benchmarks without crashing or noticeable artifacting. We'd air on the side of caution and say that some extensive gaming would be required to be sure that no artifacts were popping up and that the card was fully stable, but nevertheless we got a very good overclock on the core, and even backing off to guarantee stability will likely leave you with an impressive speed boost.
R480 has been around for a while now, in GPU terms at least. So, it looks like there could but some nice late production parts floating around which could yield impressive overclocks. Of course, it's all about luck; there are no guarantees.
