Crossfire 7850s; Lower benchmark scores when overclocked?

[Kanped]

Hey guys. I'm running a pair of Powercolor 7850s in crossfire. I was running Vantage with the stock clocks (860Mhz), got to about X19500. Then, I used ASUS GPU Tweak to knock it up to 1050Mhz (I've tried other software, too). This time, the result was around X18500. The max temp was in the low 60s, so I don't think it could be anything to do with overheating and obviously the tests all ran fully and stable (stabley? Is that a word?).

Just wondering if anyone had any idea what could be going on and if I can OC these cards and get an actual performance boost, rather than a hit, out of them?

 

[dragoonk]

Well you have to make sure you clocked BOTH GPU's atthe same time. It is known that a dual GPU graphics card or a Crossfire/SLI Config can lose performance if only one GPU is overclocked... from my experience.

 

[Kanped]

Yep. Nailed it in one; result is X21431 after fixing it. Never even occurred to me. neither did it occur to any of the people on the other forums when I was googling this issue before just asking here.

 

[dragoonk]

Well I am very glad I could help. . That is a good X score.

 

[Kanped]

Yeah, thanks very much for your help! What I'm really happy about is now the GPU score is really balanced with the CPU score rather than lagging a little behind.

 

[dragoonk]

Glad you got the results you wanted. How's a single 7850 performing in GPU demanding games, like Far Cry 3, Crysis 2, Battlefield 3 etc. ( assuming you played them ) ? How do you find it/them?

 

[Kanped]

I played Deus Ex Human Revolution with one card and it handled it pretty much flawlessly at 1080. I think I had to dial the AA down a bit. IMO, it's a great card for the money. TBH, though, my budget for my rig went up during the build, so I got another one for crossfire but if I had to start over, I would have got one better card instead. I've no real complaints, it's just that it's £300 worth of GPUs and I think one of the higher end single cards would out-perform these and run cooler. If, however, I had a £100-£150 budget for a GPU, I'd get one of these in a heartbeat.

 

[dragoonk]

Yeah Their performance is pretty surprising, AMD did a very nice job with the 7000 Series. Also I belive that if you went with a single more powerful card like the 7950 I'd been much better. Crossfire setups sometimes tend to get tricky, plus the single card, (even if a Crossfire setup offers more FPS) offers better overall gaming experience and smoothness over the CFX setup honestly. But good price for the 7850.

 

[paulstung]

I can second that,I've got the Sapphire 7850 oc'd to 1151 core/1275 mem,and it plays all of the latest titles in 1080 flawlessly.

 

[Josh Weston]

Glad you got the results you wanted. How's a single 7850 performing in GPU demanding games, like Far Cry 3, Crysis 2, Battlefield 3 etc. ( assuming you played them ) ? How do you find it/them?

Speaking from my own experience, my 7850 gets around 40-45fps playing BF3 on Ultra at 1080p. That's with the card at 1200MHz on the core and 1300MHz memory.

Edit: only just realised how long ago you asked that question. My bad.