Overclocking

The CPU we had in our disposal was the Athlon 64 3200+ overclocked to 2.7 GHz (from 2.0Ghz stock). That allowed us to have a very good performance gain and alleviate much of the CPU bottleneck we would have at stock speeds. Of course having one of those new AthlonFX-60s further reduce the CPU impact, however we felt that we needed a system that was fast, but not top of the line, in order to get a better real-world performance picture from the card.

In order to overclock the X1800XL we used the overclocking tool hosted on DriverHeaven, and which you can find here. Since the new cards allow us to alter not only the clocks, but the board voltages as well, that gave us the opportunity to play some more with the values in order to get the most stable clocks for our particular board. Here were our results:

Of course we had heard of the forum rumors about the XLs overclocking very well, but I guess we had to see it with our own eyes. In order you haven’t realized it yet, these clocks are very near the stock X1800XT speeds (625/750). Both the XL and the XT have 16 pipelines, so an overclock this high should translate in a healthy boost of gaming performance. How high of course, we will see in the following paragraphs, since what we are about to do is to find out the performance the card gives us in two scenarios: at stock clocks and at overclocked speeds.