Overclocking

What made overclocking this card a bit more special than recent offerings that we've overclocked is the fact that we've got some new software to play with. The problem for not just GIGABYTE, but all other companies out there is that MSI have set the bar high with its own Afterburner software; a simple easy to use setup that supports all brands and models and gets regularly updated, making it a stand out product.

GIGABYTE has come to the party with OC Guru and at first glance it's not too bad. To overclock we need to go down and select one of the profiles. In our case we selected Profile 1. We clicked the Adjustments button which dropped down a bunch of options and we took the time to start overclocking.

The big stand out here is the inclusion of a memory voltage function alongside the standard GPU one which we've given much love to in MSIs own software. We chose to max out both settings to 1.287v and 1.677v respectively, which can be seen in the screen shot.

To make sure we were on an even playing field when compared to the recent overclocked NVIDIA offerings, the fan speed was set to manual and raised to 100%.

What we ended up with was a further 50MHz clock on the core to 1GHz and a further 50MHz clock on the memory which gave us a total memory clock of 5200MHz QDR.

While this might not seem like a huge overclock, from the default HD 5870 clocks of 850MHz on the core and 4800MHz QDR on the memory, the gains look a lot more impressive.