- Dirt 2 (DX11)

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. The game runs on an updated version of the EGO engine, which powered Codemasters' Race Driver: Grid as well. The engine features an updated physics engine and runs on DirectX 11.

It is obvious that the Inno3D GTX470 Hawk game has been developed to offer a great gaming experience with DirectX11 games. As you can see in the table below, the card gave a superb performance even when we enabled AA with DX11 and a resolution of 1920x1200:

- Overclocking

In order to easily overclock Nvidia's new Fermi series, users need to download the MSI AfterBurner 1.60 beta 5 software utility. The utility also unlocks the card's voltages allowing users to experiment with the card's limits even more. MSI's AfterBurner software is very easy to understand and work with. The 'Core Voltage' slider can be adjusted to push the voltage up to 1.087V. The 'Core Clock' slider is not selectable until you set the 'Shader Clock' slider in the desired position first. Finally the 'Memory clock' slider can be can be adjusted as desired and the fan speed can be either set or left to the 'Auto' mode.

The MSI package also includes the 'MSI Kombustor' application that stresses your graphics card in order to test its stability under overclocking. The application can be used in order to have quick stability results:

We starting our overclocking experiments and quickly managed to get a stable 687MHz/1373MHz/1765MHz overclocking without messing with 'Core voltage' at all. Don't expect any significant performance gains from this tweaking so far:

The next step was to push the card to its limits by setting the 'Core Voltage' to 1.087V. This allowed us to get a stable 805MHz/1610MHz/1900MHz:

According to the GPU-Z utility, the reported temperatures were reasonable enough with the maximum temperature for the GPU to reach the 73 degrees Celsius. This should be attributed to the big cooling system installed to the Inno3D GTX470 Hawk card. At the same time, the noise level coming out from the three fans was lower than 44dB.

So can users expect from a 805MHz/1610MHz/1900MHz overclocking?

The 3D Mark Vantage gives you the first answer with the overclocked Inno3D GTX470 to score significantly higher than itself (running at factory speeds) and of course the rest of the graphics cards we have tested so far:

In real gaming, overclocking gave us some extra 10 FPS when we ran Far Cry 2 at 1920x1200 with 8xAA and 'Ultra quality' - an impressive gain. You can further experiment with MSI's overclocking utility in order to achieve the overclocking that better fit your gaming needs. Here are some achievable overclocking scenarios, according to our tests:

• GTX 470 @ 600/1215/1674
• GTX 470 @ 725/1450/1800 (1.025v)
• GTX 470 @ 750/1500/1800 (1.050v)
  
• GTX 470 @ 750/1500/1875 (1.050v)
  
• GTX 470 @ 788/1575/1900 (1.062v)