How to overclock 2d performance of ATI 5550 Ultimate

I've just got a new ATI 5550 Ultimate (passive cooled GPU). I'm using it in Win7 and have noticed that its 2D performance is lack lustre. Further investigation has revealed that its CPU is only running at 400Mhz in 2D applications and refuses to ramp up to its full 550Mhz (3D mode) when using desktop apps.

I'm using photoshop a lot and a few other things so I want to be able to overclock my 2D performance for these applications. To be honest, I'd just like it to sit at 550Mhz all the time I am using the machine, my temps are fine.

I don't care about games, not interested in 3D overclocking. This card is actually slower in 2D than my laptop's NVidia 8600M.

I've installed the latest 10.6 Catalyst drivers, and also tried the ATI Tray Tool. The tray tool crashes my machine. Not being into games most of these things are quite new to me...

Which version of photoshop do you have? if you don't have CS4 then your graphics card is doing absolutely nothing apart from outputting to the screen.
2d acceleration involving the gpu is still very few and far between, apart from CS4 photoshop and after effects CS4, about the only other thing that will use it is video encodeing/decodeing

Hi

I'm running Win7 so the Aero interface does make use of it, not to mention also using CS4 and CS5 depending on what I am doing, mostly CS5 photoshop, but I do some video editing as well.

Yes Areo does use some gpu processing but very little, main thing about it is that is uses newfunctions that some of the older graphics card cannot do.

CS4 or later is different as that can use quite bit of gpu power to accelerate processes, note that this is ontop of cpu, the ati HD5550 is roughtly the same performance as the 8600gs (AFAIR is the same chip as the 8600M)
So how does the memory and cpu vary between laptop and desktop?

On overclocking your card the ATITools is the normal tool for overclocking ati cards however it does not work on windows7 :(
It's been replaced with gputool
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads...Preview_1.html
Should work on a 5550 but I'm not 100% on that.