Overclocking

Once the card was unlocked, overclocking the card well beyond the 400 MHz core/980 memory speeds was not a problem. Though we didn't meet full R480 core spec on our overclock, we came close, which is why these are surplus cores in the first place. Our core topped out at 527 MHz, which is close to the 540 MHz of the Platinum Edition, and beats the 520 MHz of the standard X850 XT. Due to the use of 1.6 ns memory, we reached 590 MHz (1180 MHz) without anything of a fuss.

The cards cooler is nothing near the fortitude of the X850's dual slot solution, and therefore ran extremely hot and was prone to lockups on our open bench until we began using a nearby fan to cool it properly. Running the card at these speeds will undoubtedly require a very well cooled system to keep air flowing over the card, as the small fan that comes attached currently doesn't have a very fair chance on its own.

We benchmarked the card again with the overclock in place, and came up with almost identical numbers to what we received with our X850 XT PE. 3DMark 05 and Far Cry both showed scores within the margin of error, but Half Life 2 at higher filtering levels showed a deficit of about 5 frames per second. Nothing noticeable during gameplay, but noteable nonetheless.