Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate Edition review

1. Introduction2. The Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate Edition3. Gaming Performance4. Media Performance5. Thermal Performance6. Power Consumption7. Overclocking8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

At KitGuru we don't really condone overclocking when you have a product with a passive cooling solution, its generally a recipe for crashes. That said, with the excellent thermal results we recorded earlier we felt this time it was viable to see if there was any headroom available via overclocking.

We used one of our favourite tools, MSI Afterburner.

We were stunned to see a 25% overclock available on the GPU core and just over 10% on the memory. We monitored temperatures as it is important to ensure we don't damage the card long term.

Using our hotter running Shuttle chassis we were pleasantly surprised to see temperatures hovering around the 70c point which is impressive with a 150mhz overclock on the core. This cooler is one of the best passive solutions we have seen as no long term damage would arise from these enhanced clock speeds. Our advise? leave the card at reference speeds and if you run into some gaming performance issues, crank it.

At the overclocked speeds, we were able to squeeze an extra couple of frames per second from Valve's source engine, not a massive gain but noticeable.

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