Introduction

We most always start articles like this one the same way. It tends to start with something along the lines of "why would you bother overclocking something that is already so fast?" - There's always a simple answer; because we can. With the recent launch of the card, however, we've seen a few people look at overclocking and at the moment we're a bit limited when it comes to utilities.

When it comes to VGA overclocking our instrument of choice tends to be Rivatuner. At the time of writing the software didn't support the HD 5870 so we were really out of luck there. The good news is we saw a while ago that ATI implemented their own overclocking utility into the Catalyst drivers.

On the bad news side of things, there was never a huge amount of moving ability when it came to adjusting the core and memory clocks. What overdrive offers us is the ability to possibly achieve a 900MHz core clock and a maximum memory clock of 5200MHz QDR. We've seen some cards only get around the 880MHz mark, though, so the question is, can we get to 900MHz? - Can the memory get to 5200MHz? The answer is.on the next page. Let's find out.