Legit Reviews

anyone has a powercolor x700 card? if yes submit your OC please and any suggestions on how to improve OC.

my card reached 450/425 (stock 400/266) but I couldnt get it stable for a longer period of time. after about 10 min. of doom3 it shows heavy artifacts and locks up. I got it stable at 440/415 though. I did change from stock cooling to zalmans 80d (double heatpipe) which greatly improved my OC over stock cooling.
my scores at 440/415 (830 effective memory!) is 7223 3dmark03 (was 5310 at stock) and 3119 in 3dmark05 (was 2440 at stock). this is about 35-36% improvement over stock speeds and enables me to run doom in ultra quality!. I was thinking of improving cooling of the card by installing an additional fan on the top of the zalman 'cause it warms up a lot. hope to get 450/425 without artifacts and lockup. if anyone has any suggestions to share with me or others -it would be greatly appreciated.

of course I used arctic silver5 for the thermal paste. the original compound under the stock cooling was some yellow dried-up stuff I couldnt identify.

Not a powercolor, but its no different.



Original beat up heatsink. Lapped it flat.
http://home.earthlink.net/~eckyx3/Oh%20 ... vcard1.JPG

VS stock heatsink
http://home.earthlink.net/~eckyx3/Oh%20 ... vcard2.JPG

Load temps.
http://home.earthlink.net/~eckyx3/Oh%20 ... vcard5.JPG

Keep in mind, this is an X700pro. How are your temps with the Zalman? Also, X700's are generaly memory limited, so if maxing out the core lowers your mem clock by a few mhz... well don't do it.

I'm an x800 user but I read x-bitlabs review on the x700 bravo (different card)

They have probs with using ddr2 ram, which can't scale that high (they had to lower default clock)

Their card seemed to be a dud... But my point is check if your card came with ddr2 ram --> could be limiting you OC

sbohdan wrote:my card reached 450/425 (stock 400/266)

-> the default ram speed, are your sure thats right?

The x700 should have 300MHz ram (ddr600) --> if your default speed is lower than 300MHz, then that xbitlabs review mayby usefull... (ddr2 ram can't OC too high!, your may be @ your limit, unless you do a volt mod)

kenc51 wrote:I'm an x800 user but I read x-bitlabs review on the x700 bravo (different card)

They have probs with using ddr2 ram, which can't scale that high (they had to lower default clock)

Their card seemed to be a dud... But my point is check if your card came with ddr2 ram --> could be limiting you OC

sbohdan wrote:my card reached 450/425 (stock 400/266)

-> the default ram speed, are your sure thats right?

The x700 should have 300MHz ram (ddr600) --> if your default speed is lower than 300MHz, then that xbitlabs review mayby usefull... (ddr2 ram can't OC too high!, your may be @ your limit, unless you do a volt mod)

actually the default ram on x700 is 266 (533 effective) so I think my OC of 425 (850 effective) is pretty good thanks to the zalman. I have ddr2 BTW. I have read the review on the bravo and actually was suprised that tey couldn't OC the mem. 'cause mine is pretty good. I guess I'm just lucky. if it was gddr3 then it would go much higher.

I believe Ati spec for the X700np is 400/350 (700 effective). This would not be the first time Powercolor has sold underclocked cards.

But hey, gives you some room to overclock.