So now that I've picked up my new 4870 and ran a few benchmarks at stock settings I'm looking to crank up the heat a little bit.

Therefore I'm wondering what tool everyone uses to overclock their 4800 series cards. I know that ATI tool used to be the tool of choice, is this still the case?

RivaTuner works well I think that's what most use nowadays.

Tony. .

all I have to say is...


You hit the nail right on the head there!


Rivatuner would be my choice as well. Easy to use and worked for me. Prepare to be a little disappointe din the overclocking though. It's still not around team green on that end.

Also with stock cooling on that card you're in for quite a disappointment. At least I was when I OC'd the X2 I had slightly. They need better cooling.

Indeed.

Stock I managed I THINK<-- stressing

55 mhz only out of the core and mem.

So this is the model of 4870 that I have. The Palit sonic HD4870 512mb.



The heatsink on it is pretty beefy and the dual fan design should hopefully keep things cool. Is there an aftermarket cooler that you use? Or is it just watercooling?

I will try some overclocking tonight and see how far I get.

Ah Yeah Palit ones are the better from what I hear far as cooling goes for sure. You should be ok with that then.

Agreed.

I'd like to see if any marginal gains could be made with good ol H2O

So I installed Rivatuner last night and pushed my 4870 a little bit getting it to 815 core and 1000 memory. However after I did a run of 3D Mark 06 I noticed that my score actually went down for some reason.

Can anyone explain this? It just doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps its a driver issue between my 4870 and Rivatuner?

I've been noticing the same issues as of late with a few cards...going faster does not mean better.

I think it has to do with the Shader speed and the memory timings.

Increasing the core speed, without increasing the shader appears to have some bad effects. Unfortunately, I have yet to discover the what the core/shader ratio(s) should be.

I would suggest setting the card back to default, then do 20MHZ increases on the core only to see at what freq the performance starts to actually decrease, then increase your shader 10MHz and test until performance once again increase. Do this until the test fails.

Once complete, then increase memory.

I've seen core/shader charts on the net and they are not linear for whatever the reason.

Yea, that sounds like it could be it. Do you know if the shader clock speed can be changed easily? I don't remember seeing anything for a shader clock speed in Rivetuner. Perhaps I will have to dig a little deeper.

When I overclocked my x2 I lost performance. Thought i'd bring that up.

fail

Well they run hot as is. Working at MB and owning them you should know this. Thus overclocking and generating heat can slow them down and actually have a adverse effects on performance.

Fail X2 on a MB employee reply.

I know i was just pickin on you top, didnt mean to be an ass. my 4870 has the same issue, and they do run hot even at stock. youd think for having a giant cooler on the card that stock heat wouldnt be 77 degrees