Overclocking ATI Radeon HD 5450 with Catalyst Control Center

ShadowSF96 · 15 Mar 2013

Hi, SevenForums.

My little brother's computer sure isn't very good, and he just bought Skyrim. Well it runs the game, but with a low framerate. So i was thinking about maybe overclocking his graphics card. My only concern is the cooling on the case itself. It's a Fujitsu ESPRIMO P2560. Look it up on Google pics. I don't think the cooling is very good on that case. Although, i don't have in mind overclocking it to the extreme, just a little bit so that we can improve the frame rate.

So, my question to you guys is, would overclocking an ATI Radeon HD 5450 be worth it? And do you know how much i can overclock it? And whether that cooling is good enough or not. Because i have my doubts about that old case... If it will be any help, i will link my DxDiag.

Thanks, regards,
Sebastian!

stormy13 · 15 Mar 2013

Can it be overclocked? Yes. Is it worth overclocking? Not really. You have to remember that card was at the bottom of the low end for the HD 5xxx series, and is also hampered by only having a 64 bit memory bus. You can overclock it but you will likely only see 10% or less improvement. Also does the card have a fan on it, or is is fanless/passive cooling?

One thing to do if he isn't already, is to make sure that all settings are set to low. Another thing that might help is to update the driver as from that dxdiag log, as the one currently installed is almost a year old.

nilank · 24 Mar 2013

IMO, you should only overclock it if the FPS of the game is around 20-25 FPS. This way, overclocking will give a max of around 10 FPS extra I suppose, meaning you'll cross 30 FPS and have a 100% smooth gameplay. Temps will rise within seconds, so you need to take care for that too.

I suggest using RivaTuner to overclock.

M1GU31 · 25 Mar 2013

I use to use this video card, biggest fps boost I got from it was about 10-15fps from over clocking it a bit.Can't remember the exact clocks since it's been about close to 2 years already but I guess you can say it's worth over clocking a bit so you can get 30-40fps at 1280x720 or so at medium settings like i did in mass effect 2. Just make sure your case has good airflow and it should be ok. Anyways your going to have to test it because every card reacts different to find the highest clocks you can set it to. If I remembered what clocks I used I would tell you but it's been so long that I just can't remember sadly. Just keep moving the sliders little by little and test it and if it artifacts(or get crashes/blue screens) like mine did once then it's too high. Be careful with it though, I had to go in safe mode once since mine just messed up in ccc were it would also load those unstable clocks and artifact so the only way i was able to reset was in safemode since I had more time to change settings before it would artifact. I would just test it with msi afterburner and don't check start over clocks at startup or you will get a issue like i did but with ccc. Once you find something stable you can set it to enable over clock at startup.