Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT

On budget and on fire!

Date reviewed: November 25th, 2006

Author: Christos

To overclock this card I tried several version of ATI TOOL, but the version that gave me the highest clocks was version 0.25 Beta 14. Since this version does NOT allow me to change the voltages on the X1900 GT, I also had to use ATI Overclocker. Hence I first use ATI Overclocker to increase the card's voltages, and then I used ATI TOOL to increase the clocks on the card. I used the stock cooler on the card set manually at 100% fan speed to get the max. overclock I could get. Also, at 100% the fan is extremely loud.

I increased the voltage on the core to : 1.450v and did not increase the memory voltage. With this voltage I was able to push the core clock from 575Mhz to 682Mhz and the memory from 600Mhz to 720Mhz. This was the most stable increase I was able to get. Hence we have an increase of 107Mhz (18.6%) for the core, and an increase of 120Mhz (20%) for the memory, which is amazing. Please note : at this overclock the temparature on the core was hitting close to 100 Degrees Celcius. Hence we will try to reduce that next time when we look at the Sytrin VF1 Plus VGA cooler.

So now, let's see if the above increases will also benefit our games.

In HL2 Episode One the card does well in it's stock speeds, so the overclock is less of a requirement, but we still get impressive increases, the overclock gives out an extra 7 average FPS and also increase the min. FPS by 6. Not bad at all. Unfortunately there was NO increase at all in the 1920 x 1440 resolution with the same video settings as in the chart above.

In FEAR, the increase in clock speeds does allow us to play at higher resolutions. We see an increase here of 6 average FPS which translates to an amazing 22% increase. This allows us to play now at 1900 X 1200 with 4xAA enabled but with Soft Shadows still turned off.

If you need to play with 6xAA turned on, the overclock will get you as close as possible by increasing the average FPS by 4 that's 16%, bringing it to 29. Hence, now you will probably be able to play with 6xAA turned on if you really desire to.

Also, by turning on Soft Shadows and turning off AA, we get an extra 5 average fps, for a total of 32. The 18% increase will now allow us to play with Soft Shadows "ON" at the higher resolution of 1600 X 1200, which we couldn't do before. I also did a benchmark with Soft Shadows "ON" with 2xAA (Not shown) and the card produced 28 Avg. FPS. Hence if you need both those settings "On" the card will be able to handle it since it's so close to that magic number : 30FPS.