Overclocking X700 XT - Far Cry Performance
Here we'll take a look at the overclocking capabilities of the Radeon X700's. As usual, the overclocking capabilities will vary from board to board and this shouldn't be used as a definitive guide to the overclocking potential of all X700 boards.
X700 XT
In the case of the X700 XT we managed a stable overclock of 525MHz for the core and 560MHz for the RAM, representing a 50MHz core and 35MHz RAM overclock. The XT version of the X700 does also feature Overdrive capabilities, however this only moves the core speed up a minor amount to 479MHz, or only 4MHz extra.
Far Cry
| X700 XT - Far Cry (FPS) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| Default (475/525) | 85.7 | 85.6 | 84.0 | 68.3 | 46.8 |
| Overdrive (479/525) | 85.8 | 86.0 | 84.4 | 68.5 | 47.1 |
| 525/560 | 80.4 | 86.4 | 85.6 | 73.7 | 49.3 |
| % Increase from Default | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| Overdrive (479/525) | 0.1% | 0.4% | 0.4% | 0.2% | 0.6% |
| 525/560 | -6.2% | 0.9% | 1.9% | 7.9% | 5.5% |
Under normal rendering with Far Cry the X700 XT gets only a marginal performance increase with Overdrive, which is no surprise given the clock increase OVerDrive gives, but up to an 8% increase with the overclocked settings.
| X700 XT - Far Cry, 4x FSAA + 8x AF (FPS) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| Default (475/525) | 84.8 | 81.4 | 63.7 | 43.6 | 30.9 |
| Overdrive (479/525) | 85.5 | 81.5 | 64.1 | 43.9 | 31.1 |
| 525/560 | 85.4 | 84.3 | 69.0 | 47.4 | 33.5 |
| % Increase from Default | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| Overdrive (479/525) | 0.9% | 0.1% | 0.7% | 0.7% | 0.6% |
| 525/560 | 0.7% | 3.6% | 8.3% | 8.6% | 8.4% |
With 4x FSAA and 8x AF, again Overdrive is yielding a performance increase of less than 1%, however the overclocked settings are giving gains of up to nearly 9%.
