Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz (190MHz x 20)
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P (Supplied by Noctua)
Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE EX58-UD5 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)
Memory: 3 X 2GB Kingston Hyper X PC3-16000 2000MHz DDR CL9 (Supplied by Kingston)
Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 300GB Velicorapter (Supplied by Western Digital)
Operating System: Windows 7
Drivers: 8.663.1 Beta4 Hemlock VistaWin7 Nov6

What we've done here today is compare the Sapphire HD 5970 OC at its stock speed of 735MHz / 4040MHz QDR against the same card at the maximum overclock we achieved, that being 890MHz / 4775MHz QDR.

We didn't include the HD 5870 in CF for the simple fact that we wanted to clearly see the difference between this card at the stock clocks and overclocked ones. Having said that, in some of the more major benchmarks we will make note in our explanations on how the overclocked card does when compared to the HD 5870 CF setup which consistently outperformed the HD 5970 due to its higher out of the box clocks.

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Straight away we see the massive overclock bringing with it some very impressive gains. Considering the HD 5870 CF setup scored just under P 22000, these are some very nice numbers from the overclocked card.