|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
Overclocking:
Overclocking the 4890 is a simple task, to a point. The Overdrive in Catalyst Control Center allows for overclocking up to 1000MHz on the core and 1200MHz on the memory, which is alright, if you are a normal type of person that respects your hardware's right to not melt into a pool of singed copper and smoking PCB. Here at the Club, we just don't respect our hardware that way, and well, the XFX XXX edition pushed out to 1GHz without breaking a sweat. Normal people would quit here and call it "good enough", but then, no one has ever accused me of being normal. Since the Overdrive feature would not take us as far as we wanted to, I had to turn to third party tools to acheive our goals. For this, I turned to Guru3D's RivaTuner. Unfortunately the latest RivaTuner does not natively support the 4890, so thank goodness Guru3D has an updated config file. All you have to do is dump the contents of the .zip file into your RivaTuner folder after you install RivaTuner. Now that we have our overclocking tools ready, we need a tool to test our overclocks for stability. For this, I have tapped onto FurMark. What is FurMark? FurMark (or the big fuzzy doughnut, as my kids call it) is a simple OpenGL application designed for one purpose: to stress your GPU. So, by breaking out of the Overdrive box, how far were we able to push? Amazingly, the XFX XXX edition was able to push to an astonishing 1020MHz on the core, and 1240MHz on the memory. Test Methodology: To test the XFX XXX 4890, we used the exact same test bed as our 4890 review from last week, as well as the same tests. But there is a difference. This time, we overclocked everything, including the 4870 Toxic that we will be comparing it against.
Here is a recap of our tests:
Are we ready for a showdown? Let's roll!
|
