ATI Graphics Card Buyer's Guide 2006, Part II

HIS Radeon X1900 XTX - Overclocking And Heat

The default clock speeds are given as 500/594 MHz (GPU/memory) in the driver's information center; the overclocking presets in the overdrive tab of the driver are set to 648/774 MHz. (All of our X1900 XTX samples came with this combination of frequencies preset in the overdrive section.) In order to overclock the card, the automated clock configuration utility must first be run, which takes a few minutes. During our test, this procedure was aborted twice due to the driver's VPU recover module. We acknowledged the error message and let the configuration process continue. Once it completed, we accepted the suggested speeds suggested, which automatically set the card to run at these frequencies. The HIS X1900 XTX can be overclocked to a maximum frequency of 679/797 MHz, which is marginally less than either the Gecube and Powercolor samples achieved (these units were tested in Part 1). Overall performance increases by 2 percent as a result of overclocking. Again, the memory frequency displayed in the screenshot refers to the physical clock speed; since this is DDR memory, the clock speeds are doubled in the technical specifications.

This chip gets quite hot: it idles at 52°C in 2D mode and it reaches up to a toasty 92°C under extended 3D load. The chip seems to cope with the heat quite well, but the cooler can be very noisy.