We've tried to overclock the Volari, but surprisingly enough the clock speeds for the memory and the core are still not matching those factory specified numbers. According to XGI 's official specs, the card should operate at 350 MHz core clock, and 1000 MHz memory speed respectively. These numbers were not near close to what we've experienced. According to the drivers, in Reactor 1.00, the Volari Duo V8 Ultra had 328/900 MHz, and in the latest 1.01 version somewhat different 330/896 MHz. What is the reason behind all this? The first conclusion we can draw, is about the core, which might became instable, when trying to reach such high speed (the official 350MHz), and that is a consequence of manufacturing difficulties. The DDR II memories by Samsung are rated at 1000 MHz and according to their data sheet these modules are capable of reaching such high speeds. We are quite nervous about what can cause this uncertainty about the lower memory speed, but definitely shows us, that the card's manufacturing process is not mature enough.
Our tuning has resulted with the following results
• We were able to overclock the core clock from the stock 330MHz to 360MHz, (9%) but sadly the performance of the card improved only 0,6 per cent .
• We had more success tuning the memories: from 896MHz we've reached a whopping 960 MHz, (7.1%) above this, major screen failures occurred. Performance wise, the overclock resulted a 3,7 percent increase.
The temperature of the card changed dramatically during the overclocking process. The heatsink for the memories on the back of the card has risen from 48 to 55 degrees Celsius. According to PowerManager, the temperature of the GPUs have risen from the original 40-42 degrees to 65, using 3D apps, while during overclocking and heavy 3D load, we've even seen 70 degrees Celsius as well. Another interesting thing we've noticed was that the 2 nd GPU cooled much slowly according to the PowerManager feature, which might be true, or might be just another driver issue, and that is why they've disabled the entire feature as well J
Turning on a new feature called V-Drive resulted in no changes what so ever, and that is something again, that can be declared as a dead feature. Coming back to the PowerManager service, some things are very promising though. The AutoPower function lets the card to auto-adjust the core voltage for both the GPU and the memory chips, which comes quite handy fro those who are not willing to get into hardware modding of their precious new card. We do hope that this feature will be enhanced, and will be available on most Volari products.
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