Overclocking…so close, yet so far away

Overclocking the ASUS HD3870 TOP WILL void your warranty.

Max Overclocks

Core: 857Mhz
Memory: 2700Mhz (DDR)

Unfortunately, we were not able to get much of any overclock on the core of this card since it seems to have the same BIOS core lock as the original HD3870 cards which were released months ago. This BIOS lock limits the core to between 855 – 860Mhz and this is exactly what we see here where our journey into further bumping up the speeds of this card ran straight into a brick wall at 857Mhz. This pathetic overclock of 6Mhz is not fitting with the Top Overclocking Performance name associated with this graphics card and could have been avoided by ASUS simply using an updated BOIS for this card.

This lack of additional overclocking headroom on the core lies in stark contrast to what we were able to achieve with the GDDR4 memory. This we were able to take it from a “paltry” 2286Mhz all the way to an absolutely blistering 2700Mhz.