Overclocking a Radeon 9600 XT?

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Chubz

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I was just curious on how to overclock my 9600 XT.

I am not really familar with overclocking, I mean, I know what it is, but I just do not know how to actually do it.

The only thing that I have, is this thing in my ATI control panel called "OVERDRIVE", and I have the box that says "Enable Overdrive" or something like that, checked, so is that overclocking?

If not, what actually DOES overclock it?

Thanks for any help! :bald:
 
Over drive is a system ATI incorporated into the xt series to overclock the card when it's cool (which also means you should have temperature monitoring abilities, I will have to check on that). However I don't believe it does much overclocking. ~30 MHZ I believe. You would be better off doing it yourself. Programs like Radlinker, Rage3dtweak, and power strip should get you started.

My process for overclocking video cards is fairly strenuous but produces very nice overclocks.
1) Wait for a pretty hot day in your room so that your computer doesn't keep crashing in the summer :p (If you oc in the winter)
2) Then slowly increase the core and memory speeds. In general, I like to keep the same kind of ratio as the stock settings. Eg:
Your card is 500 core / 300 memory ... so In general I would keep a ratio of 5/3rds .
3) Increase slowly and run a strenuous benchmark. I increase in 2-3 increments until I start seeing artifacts in the program I run (3dMark2003 + Aquamark). once you start seeing artifacts go back down in 1 mhz increments and once you finally think you've reached a part where there are no artifacts. Run a burn in test for about 2 hours and keep an eye on it.
4) Make your final tweaks and this yields your max overclock for that room temperature. They overclock varies with case temperature which varies with room temperature obviosly. Which is why I do it in summer (Unless you want to run two different speeds Winter and Summer :p)

However, if you have temperature monitoring abilities in your xt, check out the temperature and once you start seeing the artifacts look at the temperature then try and clock down til it runs about 5 degrees cooler :)
 
actually the overclock is like 8mhz and it's only on the ram I think, download a program called "power strip" google it. Download the program then when it installs you'll be able to push each setting up, the core and the ram. Push each one up very slowly, and give each setting you get at least a week before pushing it higher, you'll burn your card out quicker that way
so start off by pushing the core and the ram like 5-10mhz up. Run some benchmarks to make sure there are no artifacts, cheers!
 
run 3dmark2003 ... and watch it. If you overclock your card once you get near your max overclock you should begin to see specs of white, or abnormalities in the rendering, it's a very good sign that your videocard is running too hot.
 
If you get a program called atitool it will find the max for both settings for you. You just tell it to run its routine and it will up the clock speed and memory speed on its own and then check for artifacts in the heat up portion of the test.
 
Oh, Ok, thanks for the tips/help guys!

I might try it and I might not. Since the risk involved sounds pretty big, I am just going to leave it like normal so that my stupidity (and lack of common sense) doesnt make things worse! :)
 
ThirtySixBelow said:
If you get a program called atitool it will find the max for both settings for you. You just tell it to run its routine and it will up the clock speed and memory speed on its own and then check for artifacts in the heat up portion of the test.

ThirtySixBelow: Do you know how this program works? Does is find max b4 artifacts then clock slightly lower or something to that effect? Did you try overclocking your XT with it?

Chubz: go for the overclock man ... if this atitool performs like I think it does, it should be fairly safe :) In fact, I'm gonna try it now :p


I tried atitool, I posted a new thread about it.
http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17527
 
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