Tweaking a 9600xt...

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

old technology yes, but in saving up for a car and a new Tippman marker, I can't really invest into my pc hobby all that much anymore.. so, I've gone into overclocking this thing to its full potential!

Alright, so I have a 256mb sapphire 9600xt, stock speeds are 500/300. I popped out the dinky stock fan and replaced it with a decent Vantec Iceberq5 copper heatsink/fan combo (with copper ramsinks)...

[Note: I figured that since the copper heatsink solution is better than any stock aluminum solution, that I'll be able to recycle my Iceberq5 with whatever card I upgrade to in the future]

...and I've been able to overclock the already overclocked card to 540/325 with the same stock voltage (I'm hoping to learn how to volt mod it so that I can get enough juice to overclock it further). Idle, the card run at 34 degrees core and 37 in environment and in load it will reach about 47/48 on heavy load, which is seriously not bad at all.

In ATI tool, I noticed that not only can you tweak the frequencies but the memory timings as well:

I've done my fair ammount of research on this and found jack ****.. Considering what I have, can anyone point me in the right direction as to where to start in terms of modifying my memory timings for my 9600xt? Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[BennyV04988]

OC a vga is very over rated. You chances of increased fps are negligible and often does far more harm than good. I'd suggest buying a new card altogether or trading that 9600 because it won't do you THAT much good.

 

[bsnyder100]

I have a ATI 9800 Pro 128------ How well can this card be overlocked??

 

[Apokalipse]

OC a vga is very over rated. You chances of increased fps are negligible and often does far more harm than good. I'd suggest buying a new card altogether or trading that 9600 because it won't do you THAT much good.

I disagree. the 9600, while it is an old card now, still has some life left in it.
it can run most games out today. and overclocking it will help increase playability of some games

 

[Merkwürdigeliebe]

I disagree. the 9600, while it is an old card now, still has some life left in it.
it can run most games out today. and overclocking it will help increase playability of some games

I'm seriously not joking, but I've lowered the heating in the house just to cool down my pc (its running off a 200 watt psu that's probably maintaining 199 watts of usage ) and while I am freezing my *** off up here in Canada, my pc runs cool and I've managed to overclock the 9600xt 570Mhz core and and 702Mhz effective memory speed, and its quite stable, the temps are AMAZING, not even hitting passed 45 degrees under heavy load.. but I can't get passed those clockings anymore!

I'm sure it's cuz I don't have enough juice in the card, I need to pump it up with voltage, I'm feeling that I can get this thing to 600/740 easily. Err, there's a lack of volt modding guides though, especially for Radeons (apparently radeons from different companies are heavily modified, so there's not one volt modding guide for ALL 9600s).

With the overclocking I've done now, there's been a definitive +10 fps increase in the average for the rotating fury cube in atitool. That's pretty significan't when its running at under 80 frames

My main question though is what do those options for the memory timings do?? Are less or more clocks better? How should I approach modifying the memory timings?