As most of you with most videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.

What do we need?
One of the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download here. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.

Where should we go?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 30 to 50 MHz.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it ;)

All in all... do it at your own risk.

Now here's where things get even more interesting. The card seems to be a decent overclocker as well, and yes... that's on top of the already massive clock frequency.

GPU clock frequencies:

• The reference clock for the 4890 series is 850 MHz, Sapphire clocks it at 960 for this model, we ended up at 1051 MHz.
• The memory clock for the card is 3900 MHz (975x4), we ended up at 4400 MHz (=1100x4).

 I would not be surprised to see you guys yield even better results.

We used Rivatuner, here's what such an overclock will get you extra, performance wise:

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

The title shows a very nice increase in performance especially in the lower segment of resolutions. We see this often with this title. Mind you that we used the same settings as before, everything maxed out in-game.

In perspective, at 2560x1600 we see an increase of yet another 8~10% overall, thanks to this overclock.

Crysis Warhead

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

Now with a title so GPU dependant, the score is always fairly low. However the overclock on average adds 3 FPS to the performance, which again is a 8~10% performance benefit.

Coming from the Radeon HD 4870, 10% here, 10% there, accumulated the numbers start to really make a big difference. Please, don't over-do your tweaks though, and be careful as overclocking typically is not covered by product warranty.

Alright, enough numbers already. Let's head on over to the conclusion.