Overclocking
Out of the box the card does not come with an overclock and does not come with overclocking software from the factory. Well that will not stop us, shall it? After loading up MSI afterburner (I prefer it much more than the catalyst control center overclocking) it was on! Initially I worked my way up to 845/1001 but the card would artifact in a couple of benchmarks so I settled on 809/978. If you are keeping track that is 159mhz core over stock! The memory was an even more impressive 178mhz over stock! Holy cow this thing clocked great. Those are the same speeds as the Radeon 6670 which is more expensive, so if this card can run that fast in all of the benchmarks it may make the upper-level card non-relivant.
Temperatures:
Temperatures throughout overclocked testing maxed out at 47*C. Take note that the fan speed is constantly 100% and cannot be changed but it remained inaudible throughout testing. With that in mind, the overclocked temperatures were only 1*C warmer than stock temperatures so the cooler is infact doing its job!
GPU-Z
3dMark Vantage
Physx Off:
HOLY BATMAN, there is almost a 1700-point increase in total score with the large overclock. The GPU-score increased by over 1000 so needless to say, this card needed an overclock to bring out its true colors.
Heaven Benchmark
Direct X 9:
Once again an extremely solid boost in score. We are talking amost a 25% boost in speeds from an overclock!
Direct X 11:
Once again we see how limited the card is by its clocks. If this card was clocked in the 1ghz range it could really dominate its price-range.
Far Cry 2
While 19.11 fps does not look like a huge number, compared to before we are talking over a 25% boost in performance again.
Battlefield 3:
The difference the overclock made in battlefield was like night and day. At stock clocks the game was extremely choppy even at medium settings. However, once it was overclocked I was easily able to play on medium without too much choppyness. Everything was much more smooth and the game was entirely more enjoyable. Minimum framerates with 5fps higher than stock clocks! Not to mention the fact that the Average overclocked fps is almost the same as the maximum FPS on stock speeds. If that isn’t drastic, I don’t know what is.
Stalker: Call of Pripyat
When your FPS is this low 2-3fps per test makes a big deal. It is nice to see that the FPS is scaling with the overclocked frequencies.
Street Fighter IV
Over stock clocks, the game score improved by a full letter grade. Just watching the benchmark it was very noticable that the game runs much more smoothly when overclocked and would be what you could consider playable.
Overall, this card is greatly underclocked out of the box. It would be nice to see HIS package the card at 750mhz core and destroy the rest of the Radeon 6570 market!
