O/Cing GFx Cards

[Alex]

OK, this may seem really dense, but to overclock a grafics card do you just up the AGP frequency? Or is it much more complicated than that?

Looking with an NF7-S and a radeon 9600pro...

[blockers]

Hi.
The AGP frequency only improves data transfer, so as that is an 8xAGP card there is not need, this only allows minimal gains anyway.

To overclock download a program such as powerstrip, or rivatuner. I have a nvidia card, people with ATI's will tell you better ones for ATi.

Get the program, and run it. It should be fairly self explanatory. In riva turner there are two bars that you slide up and download in order to change the clock speed of the GPU and RAM individually.

It works well.

When overclocking:
a) Only do one thing at a time, find the max core [GPU] first, and then try the RAM.
b) With the core the limit is when games start to crash, you may get artifacts. With the RAM artifacts are when you know you have reached the limit.
c) benchmark each time you change the speed. even if you are not at the max of the card points in 3dmark may start to drop off.
d) Upping the volts for the card does not really enable lots more overclocking, it may allow a little but not much.
c) The cooling should be good enough (what manu is the card?)

hope that helps in some way.
Will

[SilentDeath]

^ well said

get teh latest omega drivers from www.omegacorner.com tehy have a program called radclocker bundled with them, which is what i use, and th drivers are better than ati ones imo.

test first with 3dm21, just doing the game tests, leave the theory and image ones out. find the max clocks then try it with 3dm2k3. with my 9700 i knew the mem could do 313 fine, but i didnt knwo about the core. in 3dm2k1 it will do 420 fine, 430 it crashes, but in 3dm2k3 above 405 on core makes artifacts, i think... little black or while dots which are very hard to notice appear sometimes.

wouldnt recommend overvolting anything without proper cooling, ive found it makes a huge difference on my ram, cpu and nb.
the higher voltage you use the less extra mhz per voltage increase compared to a slightly lower voltage you get.

[Austin]

Yep only I'd suggest finding the RAM's max limit first and then the core, esp for the 9600PRO which is begging for more RAM bandwidth. I find the RAM is better to up first as modern cards tend to gain quite equally from both core and RAM, upping the RAM tends to stress the card less and produce less heat than upping the core. If you want to find the best setting then it's best to try it both ways, I doubt it makes much difference really.

I also rec the Omega version of drivers. For some Radeons you may experience clock resetting or crashing when you try upping the RAM or core, for that you need ...

CAT3.7 (or Omegas based on them) = http://download.guru3d.com/pafiledb....on=file&id=680

CAT3.8 (or Omega version) = http://download.guru3d.com/pafiledb....on=file&id=682

So to put it simply you leave the AGP speed alone, that as said is nothing to do with the perf of the card but how fast the gfx card can communicate with the rest of the system and even 66mhz AGP4x is plenty. To o/c your gfx card you deal with the core (like the gfx card's CPU) and RAM speed which are written 400/300 (core/RAM). The RAM is DDR and most nVidia (GeForce) cards quote it with that in mind so 300mhz = 600mhz. Don't worry about all that though. All you need to do is install some o/c'ing sw and then try upping the RAM and then core (or vice versa) by 5mhz at a time until you experience instability or visual artifacts. When you find the maximum speed your core and RAM will run at stably back off at least 5mhz further for the long term. As a ROUGH idea you should expect to get from 400/300 to around 530/360.

[Alex]

Cheers guys, much appreciated!