14 - Overclocking

No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technological demands the ever so popular games impose. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward to a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the times the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

The default speeds for the HIS X700 Pro are 425MHz for the core and 432MHz for the memory clock. In order to overclock the card, we used the HIS iTurbo software which offers overclocking at safe settings with the simple click of a button.

The HIS X700 Pro iTurbo running at default settings is an incredibly silent solution as promised by HIS. As you can see below, the default fan speed is set at 67% of its maximum speed.

Pressing the iTurbo button, the core clock is automatically set to 459Mhz and the memory clock to 958MHz. Fan speed is set to 100% of its speed potential but even at that speed, the noise eminating from the fan is almost undistinguable.

Unfortunately, the resulting clock speeds did not reach those of an X700XT. Let's see how much performance boost we can get when we press the iTurbo button.

In Doom 3, where the extra boost is mostly needed, the framerates only increased by 2 or 3 fps, which unfortunately is far from noticeable. However, in Far Cry and Half Life 2, the performance gain varies from 3 to 7fps depending on the resolution.