No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technological demands the ever so popular games impose. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward to a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the time the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

As we have already mentioned, the EAX1800XT TOP comes already stock overclocked. The default running frequencies from ATI for the X1800XT series are 625MHz core clock and 750MHz memory clock. But the default core and memory for the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP, as we received it, were set at 695/792 MHz. The higher clock frequencies are due to the Arctic Cooling cooler that ASUS equipped the ATI card with. In order to read the idle temperature, we left the system for a while without doing anything and the temperature was around 39°C while during 3D Mark05, it increased to 59°C.

IDLE temperature	Gaming temperature

To overclock the card, we ran the Automated Overdrive wizard from the ATI control center, which should find the best frequencies. The overclocking achieved was minimal, with just an additional +4MHz for the core clock and +5MHz for the memory. But then, we are dealing with an already overclocked card.

The next bit of news is probably going to disappoint you. We ran 3D Mark05 in order to see if there was a performance increase with the albeit small overclocking. We got 100 points less than with the stock frequencies. We then tried F.E.A.R. and there wasn't any difference from the default clocks. We decided to stop there set the card to the default frequencies. In any case, who needs to overclock this card? After all, it performed really well in all our test games... :-)