[bluefluid]

PowerColor Radeon HD 5970 LCS

Since this card from PowerColor is water cooled, I was expecting big things from the card. The previous video cards I water cooled exhibited huge gains on the core clock speeds so that was the bottom line expectation. The last HD 5970 I tested was an aircooled card so I was limited to a lower voltage as well as the temperatures of the GPU cores. The air cooled card peaked at 69 degrees Celsius under load when overclocked using an 85% fan speed with 1.16 volts to the cores. The difference here is just stunning and of course really depends on your water cooling loop but using a loop that cooled the CPU as well as the card, the load temperatures with 1.275 volts to the cores averaged 35 degrees Celsius, a 34C difference that in the end contributes to the 1010MHz core clock speeds achieved on the PowerColor LCS HD 5970. To reach this level I opened up MSI's Afterburner utility and manually set the clock speeds and voltage to the levels I used on the last 5970 I looked at, which is 890MHz on the two Cypress cores and 1250MHz on the GDDR5 memory. The memory on this card scaled about the same so no more effort was expended there and all of my focus went to the GPU cores. These I bumped up in 20MHz increments until I had lock ups in the stability testing then I backed down and adjusted the voltage. Wash, rinse, repeat until I found what were the final clock speeds I could achieve. All in all, a very healthy overclock.

Izvor: overclockersclub.com