ATI Buyer's Guide, Part III: All Graphics Cards!

Gecube Radeon X1800 GTO - Overclocking And Heat

The default clock speeds are given as 500/495 MHz (GPU/memory) in the driver's Information Center. In order to overclock the card, the automated clock configuration utility has to be run first, which takes a few minutes. Accepting the speeds suggested by the utility automatically selects them.

Our first attempt, which determined a clockspeed combination of 574/549 MHz, resulted in a frozen system after ten minutes. The second and third attempts lowered the memory frequency to 500 MHz, while maintaining a GPU speed of 574 MHz. After our test system locked up again, it became clear that the GPU frequency was still too high. Therefore, our fourth attempt was undertaken the old-fashioned way - we set the clock speeds manually. At 540/525 MHz, the card was stable and caused no further problems. Of course, it's possible we could have eked out a little more performance, but as we saw above, the driver's automatic overclocking feature did not perform reliably.

The memory frequency displayed in the screenshot refers to the physical clockspeed. Since this is DDR memory, the clock speeds are doubled in the technical specifications.

In 2D mode, the card operates at around 55°C. Under heavy and extended 3D load, the temperature rises to a maximum of 69°C. The fan kicks into higher gear as soon as the chip gets even warmer, audibly cooling it back to 67°C.