Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.



The overclocks of our card are 960 MHz core (20% overclock) and 1370 MHz Memory (14% overclock). It seems that most recently produced Cypress cores can hit between 950 and 1000 MHz. I am sure with good cooling or a voltmod this card could easily reach the magic 1000 MHz mark. Memory overclocks nicely too, just like we have seen on all other cards using Samsung memory.

MSI includes their Afterburner overclocking utility with the card and claims support for voltage control. We downloaded the latest 1.51 version, which shows an adjustable voltage slider, but it doesn't work. We tested this by changing voltage using Afterburner and manually measuring it on the board with a multimeter in both idle and load: no change. An easy test for you to do if you don't have a multimeter is to set the lowest voltage and load the card using Furmark. Now increase the voltage to the maximum, temperature should immediately increase, not the case on the MSI HD 5830 Twin Frozr II.

Another minor issue is that the CCC Overdrive limits are too low for serious overclocking. You can put Afterburner into an unofficial overclocking mode which removes the CCC limits, but this requires manual editing of INI files, a move many users may not like.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 18.9%.

Temperatures

Idle temperatures are really low, but so is fan noise: a good combination. Under load the card tends to be quite noisy however, but there is some temperature headroom to quieten it down some. Unfortunately this has to be done by the user, it would have been nice if MSI designed their card like that.

Clock Profiles

Modern graphics cards have several clock profiles that are selected to balance power draw and performance requirements.
The following table lists the clock settings for major performance scenarios and the GPU voltage that we measured. We measure on the pins of a coil or capacitor near the GPU voltage regulator.


AMD includes their own overclocking utility with Catalyst Control Center. While easy to use, it also limits the maximum overclock to a predefined limit in the BIOS. This limit may vary from vendor to vendor or product to product. Following are the upwards limits for overclocking CCC gives you.