5850 Overclocking Thread

[jonathan_phang]

Hello All,

just managed to install my Powercolor 5850 (managed to pick up the last one in stock at ebuyer for under £200) and have been really impressed with the stock performance over my 8800 GTS 512.

I've read a few bits and pieces about the overclocking potential of the 5850 and knew the limits in the CCC are pretty conservative, so whacked them to the limits and had a play - to be honest, its only Crysis that I can notice the difference in, everything else was running fine maxed.

I had a look at a few other forums but found that this post seems to summarise the apps and bioses needed to change the OC limit and voltage etc.

I had a quick search for a similar thread on Hexus and there doesnt seem to one (I'll prob get proved wrong!) so just want to ask 5850 owners here what they have managed to push their 5850s to and using what methods/voltage/etc.

Just would be interested for fututre games, where I might need the extra performance, although its great at stock as it is!

[jonathan_phang]

ok, so it looks like I have the embarrasment of replying to my own post Anyway, thought it might be useful to post an update. Using things from the above link (and this in particular, I manged to change the bios on the card to bypass the conservative CCC overdrive limits. After some initial tests, was able to push the core to 800 and the memory to 1200. If I can be bothered I might push it a bit more, and maybe start playing with voltagest too, but really, I need to stress test a bit more just on those. It flash was very simple to do, and the toughest part was finding out how to get my P5Q-E mobo to accept a bootable USB drive

Performance wise, its only really noticeable when playing Crysis WH, which has noticeably less drops to below 30fps than previous and I can have 2xAA now and more settings on enthusiast. I may put it back to stock for now as nothing else needs that power bar warhead, and I need to finish ME2 first, but good to know the card has some headroom if I need it.

Same process (obviously diff BIOS) applies for 5870s too. What a great pair of cards.