15 - Overclocking

No matter what your graphics card is, 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 to a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though on most occasions the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

This is the case with Powercolor's X600. As we weren't satisfied with the results from Doom 3, we were eager to push the clocks a bit higher than normal, just in case gaming would get any better.

The X600's default timings were 500MHz for the core and 370 for the memory modules. Without hesitation, we increased the core speed to 550. We were disappointed to see that it couldn't handle 3D applications and the computer froze for some time. Turning down the clock we managed to find a stable speed at 535MHz and no matter for how long we let it loop 3DMark05, it didn't overheat.

Increasing the memory clock is always the easiest part as no freezing occurs and there is no need for rebooting your machine. As we mentioned earlier, Powercolor's X600XT came equipped with a set of Hynix memory modules which made it easier to withstand the values we set. That way we got to set the memory clock speed up to 435MHz successfully.

Game framerates changed accordingly:

No doubt we expected more, with the back of our minds still fresh from our Powercolor X300 experience which proved to be the best overclocker we have ever seen. However, keep in mind that the XT extension in the card's name means that it is already running at a higher clock speed than the plain X600.