PowerColor Radeon HD 7730 1GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

Overclocking was fruitful and we managed to get to 1GHz on the core and 1300MHz on the memory. We probably could of gone further but the CCC limitations stopped us. The total overclock was 25% on the GPU core and 15.6% on the memory – very impressive for such a budget card. This gave us an actual performance gain of 21.1% with a P3071 Overclocked score compared to P2537 at stock. This was breathing down the neck of a stock HD 7750 which scored P3165. Of course the limitations are there primarily to prevent you from reaching the levels of a HD 7750. I think if the limitations were circumvented we’d probably be able to catch the HD 7750 quite easily. However, navigating these limitations is tricky without custom drivers, custom overclocking utilities or custom VGA BIOS’.

I am still quite surprised with the overclocking successes because the HD 7750 was a bit of a rubbish overclocker – barely managing to go from 800 to 900MHz for most people. This HD 7730 is based on the same GPU and can manage to go from 800 to 1000MHz comfortably. Clearly the deactivated parts of the same GPU die give greater overclocking headroom.