Overclocking Radeon 2900 Memory

[SlowSpyder]

I have a Radeon 2900 Pro, I have the GPU core overclocked to 700mhz but have the memory at the stock speed of 1600mhz. I am quite happy with the performance of the card so far, but as most of us I like to tinker to see if I can get more out of it. I haven't pushed the core any further, but one day I'll see where it tops out at. But, I was wondering, is there really any need to overclock the vram? With the 512bit bus the card already has about 100gb/sec of memory bandwidth... I doubt the GPU is starved for bandwidth, but certainly can't say that for sure. I don't care about benchmarks at all, but would overclocking the memory in the card have any tangible benefits in real life games? Of all the reviews I've seen where the reviewer overclocks the Radeon 2900 series cards, they always overclock both the vram as well as the core when they benchmark, so I wasn't sure if there really is a need to overclock the memory. Any thoughts on this are appreciated... thanks!

 

[thilanliyan]

I think you'd probably see larger gains from overclocking the core. As you can see from the 3870, it has much lower bandwidth and is fast as and sometimes faster than the 2900.

Most people have clocked their 2900 pros to XT speeds (the core that is). Some people even flash the XT BIOS but I wouldn't recommend doing that because it usually voids your warranty.