Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC 3GB Overclocked Further

When overclocking a graphics card, it’s not as simple as it is with a CPU and can’t be achieved within the BIOS. Instead you will require specialist software to overclock. With this article, we decided to use Sapphire Trixx for its ease of use and fantastic capabilities.

After spending some time getting familiar with the way this card likes to be handled, we found certain sweet spots for the card. Instead of increasing the voltage straight to its maximum 1.3v limit, the card seemed to prefer 1.237. By putting the voltage to this, we were graced with a whole load of headroom to take the card to. This was the situation with both the GPU core clock and the memory clock speeds.

A quick validation of GPU-Z allowed us to see that the overclocks had been taken into effect. It also allows us to see a quick comparison between the default clocks and the results we achieved, which certainly left us with a big grin on our faces.

In terms of benchmarking and stability tests, there is a whole bunch of different software applications on the market that we could have used. Looking around at what the most frequently used benchmark tool would be, we were then faced with the decision of 3DMark 11 or Unigine Heaven. We decided to plump for 3DMark 11 due to its scalability and large user base behind it.

We knew that the 7950 OC on its own merits could easily hit 7400 points on the Performance preset, but with some light tinkering around, we were easily in 9000 point territory. Not being disheartened or anything, but we set our sights on that magic 10,000 number and with the overclocks we ended up with of 1270MHz/1550MHz, we managed to hit that magic number.

Also to give some more clarification, we took a screenshot of 3DMark 11, TriXX, GPU-Z and CPU-Z for use on HWBot, which you can find our entry here.