Best Graphics Card Overclock?

Okay, so here's the deal guys... I purchased a PowerColor Radeon HD 5570 from newegg about half a year ago and I have to say, it's taken care of my needs quite well so far. However, (and you know how it goes lol) the other day I decided to mess around with overclocking it in CCC, and my results maxed out at around 700MHz on the GPU and 716Mhz on the VDRAM (the GPU slider maxes out at 700MHz, stock settings for this card is 650MHz GPU and 667MHz DDR3 VDRAM). Not a bad overclock in my experience but I wanted to see how far I could actually take my cheap little $50 card lol. Long story short, after downloading FurMark, TriXX (an excellent GPU overclocking utility designed by Sapphire, which supports any Radeon card regardless of brandname), and CPUID's HWMonitor I found that my card currently maxes out at 815MHz GPU and 710MHz VRAM (as mentioned I had it higher at one point, but @ 716MHz it was capping my GPU @ around 775MHz) while staying stable and at 66oC (153oF) on the FurMark Stress Test after 20min (with fan set to 100% manual). While the VRAM overclock may not be that great (6% OC), taking a budget card's GPU from 650MHz to 815MHz (25% OC) on STOCK COOLING seemed pretty impressive to me. So here's the deal, post below what you're running and what your best graphics overclock has been in the past. To be honest I'm a little excited about trying out the PowerColor Radeon HD 5770, as it has the same GPU but GDDR5 instead of GDDR3 (only for $100 too) but that priority goes under feeding starving kids in Kenya.

Oh and before anyone "calls bs", here's a validation link from GPU-Z:
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/cp5sb/

Thanks for your time - Gerthan

Welcome!!

I assure you nobody will call BS on that overclock thats actually low, even with stock cooling and voltage. You can go to HWBOT.org and Sort by stock cooling and see some of the high overclocks if you like. 1000Mhz+ core with added voltage seems to be the norm for that card.

I can validate a lot faster than I can run.

EDIT:

a 5770 or 6770 can be fun to OC.

How about this 6770

http://3dmark.com/search?resultTypeId=234&linkedDisplayAdapters=1&cpuModelId=0&chipsetId=692

http://3dmark.com/search?resultTypeId=234&linkedDisplayAdapters=1&cpuModelId=0&chipsetId=692

HWBOT would not accept the 6770 model.

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/9sn9k/

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/gchuc/

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/h5vfz/

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/53ums/

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/66wa2/

Validation is really nothing.

The two 3dmark links were run @ 992/1388

Spending a few hours testing at this speed using Unigine Heaven in DX11 mode as well as Tropics, Sanctuary, Stalker CoP and AvP everything was set; until 3DMark11 refused to do anything but freeze the system. At that point lowering the GPU to 992 and memory to 1388 incrementally was the only way to stabilize the benchmark.

All things considered this is a fun card to clock. Speeds ramped up easily and the results scaled quite well with the clocks.

http://www.techreaction.net/2011/07/15/review-sapphire-radeon-hd6770-vapor-x/3/

Click to expand...

What I am getting at is if it can not run everything then a validation is pointless. I believe you, but make it a little more challanging; lets see some high scores.

This is the only HW Bot option I have:

I did this a while back and I entered it as a 6790 but that is all I could do.

Thanks for the welcome everyone. :]

Earth Dog, out of the cards listed, it appears that the ones with the highest overclock were cards running GDDR5, and I believe that the much slower GDDR3 on my card is what is holding me back on the GPU... That, and the fact that I'm having a little difficulty updating my Drivers. Though I may very well be wrong. I'll be the first to admit it, although I've done quite a bit of overclocking CPU's, this is the first time I've really messed with overclocking graphics cards... With the VRAM set at 710MHz, I've gotten up to 825MHz on the GPU but after running FurMark for a few min, my card Driver crashes and Windows displays the "A video driver crashed, but has been recovered (or something like that)" message. After I have successfully updated my Drivers, I'll try dropping the GPU clock signifigantly to see how high I can clock the VDRAM (and visa versa)... Also I might mention that this card was designed to be a low power consumption card (no additional 6-pin power aux or anything...), so unfortunatly my voltages are locked. :'(

Archer, I'll try to post on here in the next couple hours (just got off work, graveyard shift lol) some 3DMark11 results and a few other tests, after I'm able to acertain that I've gotten things setup to the max. I guess what had me believing my OC was pretty decent was that I had seen on some other forums where a few guys were bragging about a 150MHz GPU and 75Mhz VRAM OC on a more expensive card than mine lol... Guess they were just n00bs (as the kids these days say). =}

Well gpu overclocks are a bit different than cpus. Ram wont hold core clocks back until you are at the limit. Try putting your ram back to stock and push more on the core.

Having locked voltages will put he brakes on any overclock. Thing is u will be hard pressed to find anyone with here win such a card to ompare your results with.

Okay so here's what I have...

Even with the GPU underclocked to 400MHz, the highest I could get the VDRAM was around 722MHz - Conclusion? Low factory clocked GDDR3 most likely the culprit
I found benchmarks on a Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 that was rated almost twice as fast as my card (180% in PassMark) after overclock. I looked it up, and sure enough, even though the Sapphire runs GDDR3 it's stock clock speed is 1600MHz (boo hoo) with the same GPU speed and arch as mine (40nm, Redwood) - Conclusion? Again, low VDRAM factory clock the culprit. Though it may well be that my PSU is partially to blame for the OC ceiling on the GPU, as it's one of those "Buy the case, get the PSU free!!!" deals.

I also noticed that for every megahertz that I increased the VDRAM, most of the benchmarks in PassMark would see around a 6fps increase. 0_0

As far as the actual benchmark stats go, here's the few I ran. I found that the best performance I could get was with the GPU @ 814MHz, and the VDRAM at 714MHz.

For PassMark (I assume most of the stats are framerates):
3DGraphics Mark: 723.0
3D Simple: 1052.2
3D Medium: 328.7
3D Complex: 44.8
3D DirectX 10: 7.2 (yuk)

3DMark 11 on Performance Setting and Full 3DMark 11 Experience:
P1220 3DMarks


And of course then there's GPU-Z's Validation... Which is pretty much pointless in my situation lol...
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/bemdn/

So no, it's not the best card for gaming lol. But for the $50 price tag, CFx support, Eyefinity support, OpenGL4.1 support, and DirectX11 support, it's really not too bad (especially considering I got it for free {= )

My last thoughts? If anyone mentions to me that they are shopping for a $55 card and want some decent head room for overclocking (with added CFx, Eyefinity, and GL4.1 + DX11) I'll point them towards the Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 on newegg... By all accounts one of those should be able to beat a PowerColor HD 5570 CFx setup.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102875

If I end up getting the Sapphire or a GDDR5 card anytime soon I'll CFx/OC and post my success/failure on here lol. Thanks for your time guys, I appreciate it.

Gerthy... you are going to get a lot more responses if you use a benchmark the mainstream uses my friend. You will also have the futurmark site to compare to as well as hwbot. Those places are likely the best sources for this type of information.

Also if you enjoy benchmarking and overclocking, you should look into the benchmarking team (see link in signature).

EarthDog, sorry man. I honestly am not really sure what the majority of PC enthusiasts use these days for benching lol. Mind listing a few?

And thank you much for the invitation, however I don't know if I could meet and keep up with the criteria for joining the club. I work a lot, and to be honest most of my hardware purchases are mid-level products (my new pc is running a Phenom II X4 925, which I plan on trying a 3.8Ghz/3.7Ghz OC after dumping a little extra into a Cooler Master Hyper 212+) so I think any of the things I post would be boring at best. But again, thanks for the invite.

3DMark 01, 03, 05, 06, Vantage, 11. Unigine Heaven benchmark (hwbot version). All of these can be found at Hwbot.

Gerthan said:

EarthDog, sorry man. I honestly am not really sure what the majority of PC enthusiasts use these days for benching lol. Mind listing a few?

And thank you much for the invitation, however I don't know if I could meet and keep up with the criteria for joining the club. I work a lot, and to be honest most of my hardware purchases are mid-level products (my new pc is running a Phenom II X4 925, which I plan on trying a 3.8Ghz/3.7Ghz OC after dumping a little extra into a Cooler Master Hyper 212+) so I think any of the things I post would be boring at best. But again, thanks for the invite.

Click to expand...

You don't have to have all high-end parts, you get points for pretty much all hardware as points are broken into 3 areas:

World records (top for whatever hardware you can purchase)
Global points (similar, but more restricted as in single card, dual card)
Hardware points - points you receive for benching whatever hardware you have (this is where most people get their points). So if you are using an i7 920, a Core2Duo E6600, or an i7 2600k you will get points for doing the available benchmarks for each of them.