Best (or only?) way to overclock your gpu

[Raswan]

This may be a dumb question, but is the only way to overclock my Sapphire 5870 from within the CCC control panel? As in, just use the ATI overdrive slider to tweak the gpu and memory clock settings? Or is this like using my motherboard's auto-overclock, cheapy-ass proprietary program to do something that needs to be done in BIOS to do correctly?

Having never overclocked a gpu before, I'd also appreciate posting the stress/stability tester you use to check stability and performance. Currently I have Everest, OCCT, and Prime 95 installed, but haven't been active in overclocking for a couple of years so I don't know if things have changed.

Thanks

 

[happy medium]

Disable overdrive in CCC and use Msi Afterburner.

 

[JAG87]

Or is this like using my motherboard's auto-overclock, cheapy-ass proprietary program to do something that needs to be done in BIOS to do correctly?

Thanks

Absolutely not.

In fact it's the better way. Because if you overdo it you can easily revert back.

And no where is it written that overclocking through software is cheapy-ass compared to BIOS. They act at different levels, one provides a run-time alteration, the other one a boot time alteration. Unless you know what you're doing, you're almost always better off avoiding the latter.