The exact speeds at which the overclocker pushed MSI's product were of 1380MHz for the GPU clock and of 1350MHz for the memory. The system that was used to perform the test was composed of an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard, the aforementioned MSI 5870 card, the Dragon F1 Extreme Edition CPU cooler (supplied by KINGPIN COOLING), the Tek9 3.0 GPU cooling mechanism (also from KINGPIN COOLING), and the Blades CAS7 memory modules, which ran at a frequency of 2000MHz. The total storage capability of the rig was represented by a 320GB Seagate Hard Drive and the system was running Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit RC7100 and the ATI 9:11 WHQL – FM Approved graphics drivers.
As already stated, the test made use of the MSI Afterburner overclocking utility, which allows users to modify a wide range of GPU, Shader and memory settings. Through this utility, the overclocker increased both the voltage and the clock speeds of the GPU, breaking the previous record for the single-GPU clock speed, even though the system's CPU was capped. The MSI graphics card finally gave in when the overclocker attempted to push it at frequencies of 1400MHz/1350MHz (core/memory).
Of course, the Radeon HD 5870 is already quite powerful and fully capable of handling any game or 3D application on the market. All that is left now is to wait for the next overclocking competition and see if the upcoming Fermi-based cards from NVIDIA can top this record.
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