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Overclocking

There is little doubt the HD5800 series is designed with overclocking in mind. The front of the box for this graphics card even states that you can boost performance by 17% via Smartdoctor!
The GPU comes with a volt regulator chip, meaning the card can be soft-modded. To make a long story short, it means you can increase the voltage of the GPU with, for example, Asus Smartdoctor without having to solder or mod the card in any other way to increase voltage.

The volt chip is also the reason that this card can reach mind-blowing speeds without breaking a sweat. We managed to overclock this card to 1000MHz core and 1300MHz RAM with 1.312 volt on the GPU.



In percentage terms, that amounts to:

•    850  MHz - 1000 MHz = 18% overclock on the GPU
•    1200 MHz - 1300 MHz = 8% overclock on the RAM

All benchmark tests were rerun to see if this overclock resulted in any noticeable performance boost.

3DMark Vantage:



The overclock can really be felt in Vantage, resulting in a greater score on performance, as well as a 1000 point boost on high.

3DMark06:



Here the overclock does not boost the results significantly, but at least you can see they have been improved compared to the standard speed of the card.

Unigine Heaven:



Same in the DX11 benchmark test; overclock improves all the results.

Call Of Juarez:



Call Of Juarez also benefits from the extra MHz on the card. The average fps result in the resolution 1680 x 1050 increased by about 10 fps, which is substantial.

Far Cry 2:



The slightly more demanding Far Cry 2 also likes the overclock, with performance rising all over.

Resident Evil 5:



The Resident Evil benchmark test also enjoys the overclock, with the average fps at 1680 x 1050 improving by about 10.

Furmark v1.7.0:



The result in Furmark is also higher all over, but the improvement is small.