Connect 3D X850 XT PE- 15 - Overclocking

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

Increasing the memory clock too much, produces the so-called "artifacts".

The default clock speeds of the Connect3D X800XT PE are 540MHz for the core and 590MHz for the memory. The memory clock was already set high so we didn't expect it to increase too much.

The highest stable settings we could achieve

To our suprize, we couldn't overclock the memory at all, not even by 5MHz without losing the card's stability. So using ATITool 0.0.23 (which is the first version to support the new X850 cards), we only succeeded in overclocking the card's core up to 560MHz and 590MHz (1.18GHz) respectively.

Let's see the performance boost we got from these extra 20MHz.

The difference in the games is not noticeable. As a result, it is not advisable to clock the Connect3D's X850XT PE any higher than it is already.

One more thing about the fan system on the X850 XT, the fan's speed is set by the card's BIOS on boot at 4% of its maximum value. We tried setting the fan to 100% in case the card could clock a bit higher.

However, the fan when running at full speed is incredibly noisy and annoying so we switched it back.