Introduction

Do you get scared when you hear the word "overclock"? I know I used to. Long ago, when I was first getting into computers, I learned that overclocking meant the potential doom of your computer, if done wrong, not to mention that it was unbelievably complicated. However, if done right, you were able to take a cheaper GPU or CPU and get an extra kick out of it. Sometimes you were even able to skip an entire generation of upgrades because the boost in performance was able to withstand the advancement of games for another year. This was, and still is, a big deal in the budget gamer market.

It always came at a price though - a voided warranty. Could you imagine spending $200 on a video card, getting a nice overclock on it, only to have it fail a week later, and not being able to return it? Unfortunately, I've had something similar happen to me. Years ago, I bought a 7900 GT that I bravely tried to overclock. Temperatures were great. Noticeable performance increase. I thought everything was gravy. After about a month of use I started to notice something weird. Little colored pixels invaded every game I was playing. Eventually it got to the point where the pixels turned into pretty colored lines across my screen. I reset the computer and it looked like space invaders took over my POST screen. After testing, I found out that I had burned my VRAM out. Sadly, I wasn't able to return the video card because I chose to overclock it.

The Diamond Radeon HD5770 XOC comes overclocked right out of the box. The Diamond Radeon HD5770 XOC takes all of the fear and hassle out of trying to overclock yourself. The Radeon HD5770 is a mainstream gamer card and the XOC edition is geared more for the gamer that needs a little more power without voiding their warranty. You still get all of the same functionality, like DX 11, and all of ATI's perks, such as Stream and Eyefinity.