Introduction and First Look

Ah, overclocking, it has become something that only a few of us used to do, to its own entire beast of a market. Companies make millions of dollars pushing overclocked hardware, or better yet overclockable hardware. The whole do-it-yourself aspect of overclocking can be incredibly exciting to some, just like cranking out more horsepower in a car modification.

There have been a few applications over the years that make this easier, but we don't generally see them made to look pretty like Sapphire's TRIXX Tweak Utility. MSI's Afterburner software has been the go-to overclocking application for a while for video cards, but can Sapphire's overclocking tool rule the AMD roost? Let's take a look at that.

Sapphire's TRIXX Tweak Utility was debuted all the way back in 2005 and has gone through some very significant changes in the meantime and now I've gotten around to testing it just now on some hardware I have here in the TweakTown labs. For your information, I'm running:

- Intel Core i7 3770K @ 4.8GHz

- Corsair H100 Hydro Cooler

- Corsair Force Series GT 240GB SSD

- ASRock Z77 Extreme 9 motherboard

- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7950 OC Edition

- Corsair Obsidian 800D Case

- Corsair 8GB kit of DDR3 - CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9

- Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64

- AMD Catalyst 12.11 drivers

It's a seriously nice machine, and really powers through what I do each day. I've got the CPU clocked up to remove any potential CPU-based bottlenecks, the RAM is at stock as it doesn't really help gaming performance all that much and everything else is at out-of-the-box settings.

Let's take a look at Sapphire's TRIXX Tweak Utility, shall we? TRIXX has a beautiful interface, which is very pleasant to look at. There's a curved design at play, with a tachometer-like design at the top, which I love. Each menu is set out well, and the overall color scheme is great.

This doesn't really matter that much - but looks are at least part of it. If Sapphire had unveiled something that looked poorly made or designed, it wouldn't appeal to users as much - so it's great to see they've spent some decent time on the design of TRIXX.