Bringing it All Together: Everything OC'd

So each of core, shader and memory overclocking didn't produce dramatic results on their own, but when we put them all together we get quite a different picture. It is sort of hard to set an upper limit on maximum performance improvement when we are faced with different factors that limit performance which could all interact. Throwing more factors in there complicates it as well. I'm not a statistician or mathematician, but it is logical that we could never see a performance improvement greater than the product of the separate percent improvements to each subsystem (i.e. overclocked performance must be less than (stock performance) * 1.11 * 1.143 * 1.179).

The actual limit is lower than the 50% potential gain implied by this, as there is no way to gain the maximum benefit on overall performance by each subsystem simultaneously as gaining the maximum benefit requires that a subsystem be the sole significant bottleneck. I'm not sure how to model anything this complex, especially considering the fact that the performance of any one subsystem affects the efficiency of the other two. Please feel free to school me in the comments on this one.

But the proof that you can get huge returns on overclocking is in the pudding.




1680x1050    1920x1200    2560x1600


Call of Duty and Race Driver GRID get over a 30% boost at 1680x1050 when everything is overclocked simultaneously. Everything else sees respectable gains at over 1680x1050 while these huge boosts go away at higher resolution. An overall gain of 10% to 15% at 2560x1600 isn't too shabby at all, but it doesn't live up to the potential we clearly see in some of our other tests.

The complexity of the factors that go into these performance differences deserve a little more investigation. So we'll look at a few more tests before we throw out our raw numbers.

Shader Overclocking Pulling it Back Apart: Performance Interactions
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  • SiliconDoc - Monday, June 22, 2009 - link

    Not only does the gtx275 beat the 4890, but the gtx260 beats the 4870 !
    http://www.techspot.com/review/164-radeon-4890-vs-...">http://www.techspot.com/review/164-radeon-4890-vs-...
    ..
    Oh gee, I guess I should follow dereks chart instead... ( GAG ! )
  • SiliconDoc - Monday, June 8, 2009 - link

    " Given the performance and pricing of Phenom II and the upcoming Radeon 5000 series, if AMD does not pull into black [records a profit] and achieves great sales success, we don't know what needs to happen in order for AMD to actually earn some serious money. "
    LOL
    Will ATI ever make a profit ? We keep hearing how smart they are and how they can really make money while NVidia's monster vore costs nvidia so much ! LOL
    Awwww- poor ati can't make dime one while nvidia keeps posting profits...
    http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/6/3/ati-...">http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/20...-has-the...
    ----
    Any red roosters gonna stop crowing about smaller gpu cores and their savings for ATI who loses money every single quarter, anytime soon ?
    Probably NOT - they're so smart, so wise about making gpu's.

  • SiliconDoc - Saturday, June 6, 2009 - link

    Better be careful - from their 4890 extravaganza overclock article they did first and used the results in this comparison against nvidia:
    -
    " We absolutely must caution our readers once again that these are not off-the-shelf retail parts. These are parts sent directly to us from manufacturers and could very likely have a higher overclocking potential than retail parts. "
    YES WE KNOW - NOW YOU'VE TRANSFERRED YOUR RESULTS HERE AGAINST A 703 CORE THAT IS LOWER THAN THE FTW EVGA GTX275 you can but stock faster!
    ---
    You had BETTER look at a few other places that aren't so GD biased it's built in - and Derek is insanely red rooster fan boyed, and hates Nvidia, obviously, like so many little cluckers here for over a year now.-
    ---
    Jeepers- a special 4890 up against non overclocked gtx275 in the 4890 article, then transfer the special results here, and put NOT a regular clocked 4890 as in the other article to be half fair - but jam the massive results in from the special cards they got...
    ---
    I'm mean you really can't screw it up much worse than that.
    They did their best red rooster bias blab possible, I'll say that much for em, and covered it up as best they could.

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