Moving on to the overclocking front with HIS’ card, I’m [to be honest] a little dubious about how its going to handle the high clocks, given the rather simplified cooler design. With this in mind I had a rough set of figures in my mind as to where I reckon this card will perform.
Within MSI’s Afterburner, the first port of call as always is to increase the power target as far as it will go – in this case by 20% – this allows the voltage to rise that bit further giving more stable overclocks. Working on the core clock to start and jumping straight to 1265MHz to start the card handled this without a fuss and by increasing the core in 5MHz increments the 1300MHz quickly arrived with success. Sadly this is all the core had to give, leaving the memory to be played with and bringing the memory clock up to 1650MHz quickly saw a succession of driver errors and benchmarks failing.
Dropping the core back to 1295MHz allows the memory to flow a little more freely and consequently rather than a 50MHz increase, the slight drop on the core clock allows the memory in this instance to stretch it legs right up to 1885MHz.
The rather surprising clocks, given my initial reservations, also translate into a very healthy set of of performance gains within 3D Mark 11. With a core overclock of 220MHz (~20.5%) and a memory overclock of 285MHz (~17.8%), our 3DMark 11 extreme performance result saw a gain of 318 points which works out as a ~19.1% gain. One very impressive overclock indeed.
Very good mid range card.
And great review. 🙂 I really like the descriptions.