9800 Pro Flashing/OC

[sagramore]

I just got an arctic VGA silencer on my OEM 9800 Pro (Revision 3 cooler) and figured it was probably worth giving it an overclock

my rig specs can be found in my sig if you wanna check them, but my last 3DMark 01 score was 19007 and i would like to break the 20k mark

I have radlinker installed and a little bit of experience with overclocking, but not sure how far to go or what is a decent overclock - could anyone enlighten me slightly?

I also checked my core while i was swapping the coolers over and it's an R360 which i believe means I can flash to XT easily? Flashing sounds significantly more scary than just overclocking, is it worth it though?

Cheers for anything you can help me with guys!

[SilentDeath]

I wouldnt say flashing is worth it in most cases, but might be in yours. However Im quite sure ATItool, for example, would let you get the GPU temp from it without having to flash it first, and thats about the only usefull feature the r300/r350 doesnt have.

You should easly break the 20k mark, however for gfx card o/c 3dm2k3 is a much more meaning full result.

I suggest you do a vmod, as it is really easy to do for these cards:
break of one leg of a 10k trimmer leaving the center and other end - set it to max (10k).
Solder between pin 18 and 20 of the vgpu reg chip - I forget the name but it will be shown in any guides.

the hot glue your soldering to protect it and solder a wire to the measure point so you can measure easly.
turn back on, and increase the voltage a bit (you NEED a multimeter/voltmeter!!!) - just having the trimmer there will have increased it a tiny amount, so you dont want to go too far with that cooling. Idealy you would have watercooling for voltmodded stuff.. my 9500 gpu is colder than me atm!!!!

run something like Rthdribl while slowly increasing clock speed untill it reaches the limit and either artifacts or crashes. You should really be checking temp at the same time, much above 50 is not healthy for a vmodded card.

With vmod and the improved pcb design on the 9800 you should really be able to reach 500mhz atleast. My 9700 reached 450mhz on core which was not really limited by heat or voltage, but unexpectadly died when putting memsinks on.
However its replacement, the 9500 POS that doesnt softmod, reaches 450 quite easly, and Ive not given up trying to get 550mhz from a r300 card - 550mhz becuase it is a 2x overclock over 9500/9700 nonpros.

Overclocking gpu is MUCH easyer than mem and gives much more performance gain. I wouldnt bother with vmoding or extra cooling on mem, just leave it at what it will do with stock cooling (ofc. overclocked )
Vmoding mem takes loads more effort as you probably also need to do Vtt/Vref, maybe vddq as well as Vdd.

[sagramore]

I think a volt mod is going a bit overkill at this stage I wasnt even sure if i was going to overclock it at all hehe

Thanks for all the info though - I think what i'll try first is getting it to XT core and memory speeds without any other form of modding, then ill have another think about more overclocking and the possibility of flashing

also, i know it's not recommended to just whack up the MHz, but do you think going straight to XT speeds is going to be okay on the card i've described?

[sagramore]

Well, I ran ATI Tool for a good couple of hours earlier, and I think i've found my new overclock settings with the cooler on (no volt modding or anything though)

Core = 428 MHz
Memory = 383 MHz (or DDR 766 MHz(

I'm pretty pleased with them, as it's 50 MHz up on the core, 45 MHz up on the memory (DDR 90 MHz)

My aquamark has jumped from 42.5k to 46k
My 3D Mark 03 is now 6500 as well

I'm not sure how good this 3D Mark score is for my rig spec (see sig & the above gfx overclock) - could anyone tell me?

[Chimpie]

I've got a 9800Pro too, R360 core. Flashed it to 9800XT, very happy with it. No instability at all. Even raised my core to 450, and mem to 382. Got a 46k on AquaMark too, gotta remember I've got a AMD XP, though.

The main benefit of flashing is that u can use the optimised shaders within the new core. Clock for clock, using R360 core on 9800XT bios will always be faster than a R360 on 9800Pro. Other benefits are temperature monitoring and Overdrive. Plus, u'll get a 9800XT on ur control panel!!

So if u've got a R360 core, u've got no reason NOT to flash ur bios. Just remember to use the right bios!! Check ur mem (Hynix or Samsung) and enjoy ur brand new 9800XT!!

[sagramore]

Cheers for the info mate - is it obvious whether the mem is Samsung or Hynix? Just by looking at it? And is there just one bios for each memory type or lots to choose from?