ATI Radeon X1K Overclocking - Testing R520 and RV530

Introduction

We received a lot of email in regards to our Sapphire X1800XL article all asking the same question - "why is it that you and every other site doesn't overclock any of the X1800 cards?" The answer to that question is simple, there is no tool out there that allows us to overclock the cards.

We knew there was such a tool out there but it wasn't available to the general public and even major websites had trouble getting a hold of the mystery program. Our attitude here though is that nothing is impossible and if one person can get it, there is no reason that someone else can't and in this case that someone else is us. After a month of annoying a lot of people we finally got an email in our inbox with the very tool we had been chasing.

Today we will be using that very tool and overclocking both the new Radeon X1800XT and X1600XT. We would have liked to also include the X1800XL but unfortunately it has left our hands for the time being. We will be overclocking the next X1800XL that makes it into our labs though which will be only a few days.

We won't say much else, we will simply have a look at the test system we are using today along with the overclock we got on both the cards and get straight into the benchmarking side of things. So let's not delay - what overclock did we get?

(Editor Note: You can download the X1K overclocking tool from our File Library which is still under construction, here.)