SpeedZone
Rated NC-17
|
 Posted: Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:15:25 Post Subject: |
 |
|
Hi jedihobbit and others,
I have Sapphire HD3870, which is dual slot with that red colored cooler. And lately i saw single slot Sapphire 3870 in some reviews (same as yours jedihobbit), which made me wonder whether Sapphire makes 2 same 3870 graphics card? one single and one dual slot? also my pcb is red, while yours is blue?
Anyway...regarding overclocking it...I managed to hit 857Mhz GPU and 1251Mhz for ram (+10% from original settings - 777 and 1125Mhz). I am using Catalyst 8.3, and have no problems with them at all. I also used ATI Tools in the past, but for this overclock i used only Catalyst's built-in overclocking software.
GPU would easily go over 900Mhz, but sadly it's kinda locked at max 860Mhz (so if you go over this, all you'll get will be blue screen). I know there is workaround - if you flash its BIOS and thus remove the 860Mhz barrier, but i am satisfied with this overclock so far. Ram could also already hit 1300Mhz, but like i said before...i dont care about 50Mhz more or less at this point.
There is only one thing to address here...cooling...i doubt that your single slot cooler will be able to cool gpu and ram enough, if you overclock like i did, because even my original dual slot cooler was only able to cool gpu to 45 degrees celsius at idle (GPU) and 80 degrees+ at full load. So what i did was...to install ThermalTake Duorb cooler, which i must say was quite worried whether it will do its job better than original one (because when i had it on my old X1950XTX, it hit 90+ degrees at full load...and although R580+ GPUs are way hotter than RV670, i was still sceptical), but at my great relief, it did GREAT JOB! When gpu and ram were still at stock speeds it was able to keep temps at 30 idle and 48max load! And even now at 857/1251 it runs at 35 idle and 54 degrees at full load! So i guess it couldnt be any better than this. And not to mention it does all that (Duorb) at 5V, which is also very silent (cause it was little too loud at 12V so i pluged it in voltage regulator to force it to run at 5V).
Well thats all...if you have any questions...just drop me a line or pm. 
Best wishes to all!  |
|
