Overclocking the ATI Radeon HD 4770
Posted on 29th Apr 2009 at 15:40 by Tim Smalley with 12 comments
One thing we unfortunately had to cut out of our AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 review yesterday was overclocking. Understandably, a number of our readers asked why we'd not bothered to overclock the card.
The answer is that we simply ran out of time when we made the decision to double (and triple) check all of our Far Cry 2 performance numbers when the new Radeon came out on top against the cards we'd compared it to. Although the results were theoretically possible - compared to the much-loved Radeon HD 4850, it has a higher pixel fillrate and very similar theoretical shader throughput (it's just four percent lower), we wanted to be not just doubly sure, but triply sure before publishing our conclusions.
Yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself back down into the benchmarking sweatshop that is the bit-tech and Custom PC labs to find out how well our reference card overclocked. It's worth noting that it's not the only Radeon HD 4770 we've got in house - there are a couple of partner cards already and we'll be looking at them in due course - but we've only focused on overclocking the reference card for now.
The answer is that we simply ran out of time when we made the decision to double (and triple) check all of our Far Cry 2 performance numbers when the new Radeon came out on top against the cards we'd compared it to. Although the results were theoretically possible - compared to the much-loved Radeon HD 4850, it has a higher pixel fillrate and very similar theoretical shader throughput (it's just four percent lower), we wanted to be not just doubly sure, but triply sure before publishing our conclusions.
Yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself back down into the benchmarking sweatshop that is the bit-tech and Custom PC labs to find out how well our reference card overclocked. It's worth noting that it's not the only Radeon HD 4770 we've got in house - there are a couple of partner cards already and we'll be looking at them in due course - but we've only focused on overclocking the reference card for now.
