Gigabyte HD 6850 Overclocking and Review
by sinn98
![gigabytegv-r685d5-1gd02.jpg]( "gigabytegv-r685d5-1gd02.jpg")
Name: Radeon HD 6850
Designer: ATI
Manufacturer: Gigabyte
Model: GV-R685D5-1GD
Price:
$190 @ newegg.ca (Canada)
$180 @ newegg.com (US)
Table of Contents
My name is sinn98 and I am an ATI enthusiast. I have stuck with the brand since the glory days of the Rage Pro and I continue to put my faith in ATI's cards today. I recently upgraded from a pair of HD 4850's which I've owned and used for a little over 2 years. Before that, my rig housed a pair of X1900 XTX's. Before that, a single 9600 XT card.
Over the last decade of using ATI cards, the two main things I've unluckily had to deal with were temps and the fan noise. My previous ATI cards were no exception. With GPU temps sitting in the high 60s, and VRM temps being 20-some degrees higher, I always end up losing faith in the driver's AUTO fan setting and inevitably find myself cranking the fan up manually.
That all changed a few days ago when I purchased and installed my new Gigabyte HD 6850. Before even installing the card I could see it had a decent-looking heatsink with dual fans. Upon boot up, they are barely audible. I later discovered that the fans were actually running at %76 during idle, which for any other stock fan would be an insanely high setting. Not for this one, though. Gigabyte set high default fan speeds on this card because they must have known how quiet it was. I have since gone with %100 fan speed. Even though I can hear the extra noise, it's still so quiet that I barely know what I'm missing.
When I took a look at my temps, I couldn't believe my eyes. Right now as I write this, GPU is sitting comfortably at 38C (Memory and Shader at 34C) while idling in 2D mode clocks (100MHz/300MHz). This is about half the temperature I had to deal with with my previous video cards, and with much louder fans, too. Also for the first time ever, the GPU's two other temperature diodes, MemIO and Shader, are finally behaving themselves and now stay close to the same temperature as the GPU. This was not the case with my two previous generations. While running a game those two other diodes would sometimes dip into the triple digits while GPU ran in the 70-80s.
Under regular load, this card refuses to go beyond 63C. The automatic fan setting hardly bothers increasing its speed as I saw it change from 76% to 79% under load.
From this point on, I realize this video card is not going to break a sweat easily, and will have to be overclocked in order to really test its might.
Overclocking
It's been about 4 years since my last attempt at juicing up my ATI card. Back in the day, ATI Tray Tools was the way to go. It seems the overclocking world has matured a bit since then, and now it's the card manufacturers themselves who boast some nice OC utilities. The most popular seem to be MSI's Afterburner and Saphhire's TRIXX. But since TRIXX is a little difficult to come by, I decided to let Afterburner break my warranty instead.
I refreshed my memory a bit by reading through coffeejunky's handy guide "How To: Overclock Your ATi GPU". As used in the guide, I went with techPowerUp's GPUTool for stability testing.
In order to change the voltage, I had to use a beta version of MSI Afterburner, found here. It seems that either HD 6850s are too new for the latest release of Afterburner, or MSI is avoiding liability by having volt modders use unofficial beta software. Whatever the case may be, I'm happy it exists to satisfy my overvolting needs.
Testbed
Default Clocks (775/1000 MHz @ 1.149 V)
The default clockspeeds for GPU and RAM on the HD 6850 are 775MHz and 1000MHz respectively. If all you do is install the drivers and don't mess around in CCC, these are the clocks you'll get. The benchmark scores I get here will thus be considered the base scores to compare with the OC.
![vantagedefclockse8400hd.jpg]( "vantagedefclockse8400hd.jpg")
![uniginedefclockse8400hd.jpg]( "uniginedefclockse8400hd.jpg")
![furmarkdefclockse8400hd.jpg]( "furmarkdefclockse8400hd.jpg")
![sf4defclockse8400hd6850.jpg]( "sf4defclockse8400hd6850.jpg")
Maximum Overdrive Clocks (850/1150 MHz @ 1.149 V)
The first "overclock" (if you can call it that) was done using the Overdrive sliders in ATI's Catalyst Control Center. Overdrive has been around for a long time and mostly just a gimmick as it only lets you add 75 MHz to the GPU which won't stress it out one bit. I was surprised, however, that while the slider for RAM clocks let me go all the way up to 1200 MHz, only up to 1150 was stable. I guess Overdrive's got some balls, afterall.
![vantageoverdrivee8400hd.jpg]( "vantageoverdrivee8400hd.jpg")
![unigineoverdrivee8400hd.jpg]( "unigineoverdrivee8400hd.jpg")
![furmarkoverdrivee8400hd.jpg]( "furmarkoverdrivee8400hd.jpg")
![sf4overdrivee8400hd6850.jpg]( "sf4overdrivee8400hd6850.jpg")
Novice OC Clocks (925/1125 MHz @ 1.149 V)
This was done using MSI Afterburner. Afterburner doesn't let you take it past CCC's Overdrive clocks unless you tweak it's config file to 'EnableUnofficialOverclocking = 1' (this is explained in coffeejunky's guide).
I call this a "novice" OC because although it's an unofficial overclock, it was still done without increasing the voltage. I'm not sure what I was thinking with the memory at 1125 MHz, as it could have easily been 1150, but at the time I wanted to be sure of how far the GPU could go on stock voltage.
![vantageoce8400hd6850.jpg]( "vantageoce8400hd6850.jpg")
![unigineoce8400hd6850.jpg]( "unigineoce8400hd6850.jpg")
![furmarkoce8400hd6850.jpg]( "furmarkoce8400hd6850.jpg")
![sf4oce8400hd6850.jpg]( "sf4oce8400hd6850.jpg")
Advanced OC Clocks (1000/1150 MHz @ 1.287 V)
I'm a sucker for milestones, which is why I was resolute from the start on getting this card to the 1 GHz mark. I achieved just that by upping the voltage to 1.287, stopping just short of the 1.3 V limit.
Thanks to the extra voltage, things really started to cook temp-wise. The stock fan proved resilient, though, keeping temps under 80C during full load.
Although the video cards survived all my punishing benchmarks at these clocks, I cannot say if they are 100% stable. My PC crashed twice at the same point when resetting Afterburner back to stock clocks, and Vantage stopped mid-way with a "Adobe Flash 9 running slowly" dialog box. I'm not sure if this is just Afterburner's fault as it is only beta. Other than that, no artifacts found. I always could run a prolonged stability test to really make sure, but this card is new and I'm too nervous to have that much voltage pumping through it for so long.
![vantageoc2e8400hd6850.jpg]( "vantageoc2e8400hd6850.jpg")
![unigineoc2e8400hd6850.jpg]( "unigineoc2e8400hd6850.jpg")
![furmarkoc2e8400hd6850.jpg]( "furmarkoc2e8400hd6850.jpg")
![sf4oc2e8400hd6850.jpg]( "sf4oc2e8400hd6850.jpg")
Comparison
![comparisongpu.jpg]( "comparisongpu.jpg")
As you can see, each overclock scaled predictably well for every benchmark I ran, except for Street Fighter 4 (most likely because it maxed out at 60 FPS). I regret not having a better game benchmark like Far Cry 2 or Crysis, but my choices were very limited at the time.
Comparing from stock clocks, Vantage scores increased by 17%, Unigine by 23%, and Furmark by a solid 25%.
Temperatures
![comparisontempgpu.jpg]( "comparisontempgpu.jpg")
Temperatures only started to rise sharply when extra voltage was added, and even that temp is relatively tame. Not surprising with the aftermarket-quality HSF that Gigabyte puts on this card.
Conclusion
By the end of my overclocking session, I had stretched this card's performance by over 29%, easily surpassing that of a stock HD 6870.
For $180, I was very impressed with the value and the results I ended up with. This is the first of my many ATI cards that has a qiuet fan, low temps, and overclocks like a champ. I wouldn't plan on gaming at a 1 GHz clockspeed but I'm still very glad I reached that mark. For everyday use, 925 MHz on stock voltage would be the safe bet.
I guess it's only a matter of time before I get the urge to double these up in a crossfire set up!
by sinn98
Name: Radeon HD 6850
Designer: ATI
Manufacturer: Gigabyte
Model: GV-R685D5-1GD
Price:
$190 @ newegg.ca (Canada)
$180 @ newegg.com (US)
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Overclocking
- Default Clocks
- Maximum Overdrive Clocks
- Novice OC Clocks
- Advanced OC Clocks
- Temperatures
- Conslusion
My name is sinn98 and I am an ATI enthusiast. I have stuck with the brand since the glory days of the Rage Pro and I continue to put my faith in ATI's cards today. I recently upgraded from a pair of HD 4850's which I've owned and used for a little over 2 years. Before that, my rig housed a pair of X1900 XTX's. Before that, a single 9600 XT card.
Over the last decade of using ATI cards, the two main things I've unluckily had to deal with were temps and the fan noise. My previous ATI cards were no exception. With GPU temps sitting in the high 60s, and VRM temps being 20-some degrees higher, I always end up losing faith in the driver's AUTO fan setting and inevitably find myself cranking the fan up manually.
That all changed a few days ago when I purchased and installed my new Gigabyte HD 6850. Before even installing the card I could see it had a decent-looking heatsink with dual fans. Upon boot up, they are barely audible. I later discovered that the fans were actually running at %76 during idle, which for any other stock fan would be an insanely high setting. Not for this one, though. Gigabyte set high default fan speeds on this card because they must have known how quiet it was. I have since gone with %100 fan speed. Even though I can hear the extra noise, it's still so quiet that I barely know what I'm missing.
When I took a look at my temps, I couldn't believe my eyes. Right now as I write this, GPU is sitting comfortably at 38C (Memory and Shader at 34C) while idling in 2D mode clocks (100MHz/300MHz). This is about half the temperature I had to deal with with my previous video cards, and with much louder fans, too. Also for the first time ever, the GPU's two other temperature diodes, MemIO and Shader, are finally behaving themselves and now stay close to the same temperature as the GPU. This was not the case with my two previous generations. While running a game those two other diodes would sometimes dip into the triple digits while GPU ran in the 70-80s.
Under regular load, this card refuses to go beyond 63C. The automatic fan setting hardly bothers increasing its speed as I saw it change from 76% to 79% under load.
From this point on, I realize this video card is not going to break a sweat easily, and will have to be overclocked in order to really test its might.
Overclocking
It's been about 4 years since my last attempt at juicing up my ATI card. Back in the day, ATI Tray Tools was the way to go. It seems the overclocking world has matured a bit since then, and now it's the card manufacturers themselves who boast some nice OC utilities. The most popular seem to be MSI's Afterburner and Saphhire's TRIXX. But since TRIXX is a little difficult to come by, I decided to let Afterburner break my warranty instead.
I refreshed my memory a bit by reading through coffeejunky's handy guide "How To: Overclock Your ATi GPU". As used in the guide, I went with techPowerUp's GPUTool for stability testing.
In order to change the voltage, I had to use a beta version of MSI Afterburner, found here. It seems that either HD 6850s are too new for the latest release of Afterburner, or MSI is avoiding liability by having volt modders use unofficial beta software. Whatever the case may be, I'm happy it exists to satisfy my overvolting needs.
Testbed
- Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
- Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 RAM (2x1GB)
- Asus P5Q-E motherboard
- 3DMark Vantage - More or less the current industry standard for benchmarking. Vantage scores are very common to see on review sites.
- Unigine Heaven Benchmark - A very GPU-intense (and visually stunning) rendering to show off the capabilities of DirectX 11.
- Furmark - A simple but extremely intense rendering that will heat the GPU to its maximum. Used also for stability testing.
- Street Fighter 4 Benchmark Tool - I needed to have at least one real game as a benchmark. This turned out to not be very useful for measurement's sake.
Default Clocks (775/1000 MHz @ 1.149 V)
The default clockspeeds for GPU and RAM on the HD 6850 are 775MHz and 1000MHz respectively. If all you do is install the drivers and don't mess around in CCC, these are the clocks you'll get. The benchmark scores I get here will thus be considered the base scores to compare with the OC.
Maximum Overdrive Clocks (850/1150 MHz @ 1.149 V)
The first "overclock" (if you can call it that) was done using the Overdrive sliders in ATI's Catalyst Control Center. Overdrive has been around for a long time and mostly just a gimmick as it only lets you add 75 MHz to the GPU which won't stress it out one bit. I was surprised, however, that while the slider for RAM clocks let me go all the way up to 1200 MHz, only up to 1150 was stable. I guess Overdrive's got some balls, afterall.
Novice OC Clocks (925/1125 MHz @ 1.149 V)
This was done using MSI Afterburner. Afterburner doesn't let you take it past CCC's Overdrive clocks unless you tweak it's config file to 'EnableUnofficialOverclocking = 1' (this is explained in coffeejunky's guide).
I call this a "novice" OC because although it's an unofficial overclock, it was still done without increasing the voltage. I'm not sure what I was thinking with the memory at 1125 MHz, as it could have easily been 1150, but at the time I wanted to be sure of how far the GPU could go on stock voltage.
Advanced OC Clocks (1000/1150 MHz @ 1.287 V)
I'm a sucker for milestones, which is why I was resolute from the start on getting this card to the 1 GHz mark. I achieved just that by upping the voltage to 1.287, stopping just short of the 1.3 V limit.
Thanks to the extra voltage, things really started to cook temp-wise. The stock fan proved resilient, though, keeping temps under 80C during full load.
Although the video cards survived all my punishing benchmarks at these clocks, I cannot say if they are 100% stable. My PC crashed twice at the same point when resetting Afterburner back to stock clocks, and Vantage stopped mid-way with a "Adobe Flash 9 running slowly" dialog box. I'm not sure if this is just Afterburner's fault as it is only beta. Other than that, no artifacts found. I always could run a prolonged stability test to really make sure, but this card is new and I'm too nervous to have that much voltage pumping through it for so long.
Comparison
As you can see, each overclock scaled predictably well for every benchmark I ran, except for Street Fighter 4 (most likely because it maxed out at 60 FPS). I regret not having a better game benchmark like Far Cry 2 or Crysis, but my choices were very limited at the time.
Comparing from stock clocks, Vantage scores increased by 17%, Unigine by 23%, and Furmark by a solid 25%.
Temperatures
Temperatures only started to rise sharply when extra voltage was added, and even that temp is relatively tame. Not surprising with the aftermarket-quality HSF that Gigabyte puts on this card.
Conclusion
By the end of my overclocking session, I had stretched this card's performance by over 29%, easily surpassing that of a stock HD 6870.
For $180, I was very impressed with the value and the results I ended up with. This is the first of my many ATI cards that has a qiuet fan, low temps, and overclocks like a champ. I wouldn't plan on gaming at a 1 GHz clockspeed but I'm still very glad I reached that mark. For everyday use, 925 MHz on stock voltage would be the safe bet.
I guess it's only a matter of time before I get the urge to double these up in a crossfire set up!
