ATI's Radeon 9800, 9600 & 9200: Still Fighting Strong

Overclocking

When we first took a look at the 0.15-micron R300 core, we were able to overclock it from its stock 325MHz core clock to close to 400MHz in a lot of cases. With the R350, although we're still dealing with the same 0.15-micron process, it is over 6 months more mature and thus we can expect even higher clock speeds.

We were quite pleased to be able to overclock the Radeon 9800 Pro from its stock 380/340MHz clocks to 420MHz core and 380MHz memory, without any visual artifacts (at 430MHz core we started to develop artifacts, the same applies to higher memory clocks as well). Note that this is an increase of 10% to the core and 11% to the memory clocks of the Radeon 9800 Pro, not too shabby at all considering we're still dealing with a 0.15-micron core without any excessive cooling.

Unreal Tournament 2003 4X AA/8X Perf Aniso 1024x768x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (420/380) Radeon 9800 Pro 1.10 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

Unreal Tournament 2003 4X AA/8X Perf Aniso 1280x960x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (420/380) Radeon 9800 Pro 1.12 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

Unreal Tournament 2003 4X AA/8X Perf Aniso 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (420/380) Radeon 9800 Pro 1.11 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

The overclock yielded a 10 - 12% increase in performance with 4X AA and Performance Anisotropic Filtering enabled.

Unreal Tournament 2003 4X AA/8X Qual Aniso 1024x768x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (420/380) Radeon 9800 Pro 1.12 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

Unreal Tournament 2003 4X AA/8X Qual Aniso 1280x960x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (420/380) Radeon 9800 Pro 1.12 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

Unreal Tournament 2003 4X AA/8X Qual Aniso 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9800 Pro (420/380) Radeon 9800 Pro 1.10 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

We continue to see a 10 - 12% increase in performance with the Quality Anisotropic filtering setting selected.