thiru

Hey overclockers.
I have a ATI Radeon 9600Pro with 256MB RAM with stock speeds of 400 for the core and 250 for the memory (=400/250, right?).
Well I used ATITool to overclock it a maximum of 565/252. I'm wondering why I can overclock the core by 40%, but can't get better than a 0.08% gain on the memory... Could it be the manufacturer, maybe the quality of the RAM (I got some unknown thing called Triplex Parasouls)?

And should I touch the AGP bus speed (that 66MHz thing in the BIOS) or the AGP voltage?

laboitenoire

I'm not an ATI user, but I can answer your other questions. You should never touch the AGP speed or voltage. While doing so *might* give you slightly better performance, running any motherboard component out of spec (like AGP and PCI buses) can cause hell on your system.

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guitar22891

I don't own ati either but try to leave the core on stock and see how much you can take the memory from there. If it doesn't go any higher then I guess your best bet is what you have right now. Heat might also be a problem with your card... don't let it get to hot...

xie67

And the fact that the memory IC's are only DDR.

May I suggest to drop the core down below stock and manually bring the memory clock up by 2-5MHz each time and run an artifact scan to check on the stability.
When you start to get artifacts and reset's on the time counter for errors back it off about 10% of the gain and run Aquamark3 benchmark to load it up if it passes re run the artifact scan and check it again.
You need to heat the GPU and memory up a fair bit to get a real indication of it's overclock stability.

thiru

I don't see the advantages of underclocking the core to overclock the memory (surely it can't be better than 565/252?).
DDR memory on GPUs is like DDR memory on PCs? If so, then maybe it isn't so surprising it only overclocks to around 250 (so it'd be DDR500 that doesn't overclock well or something that's already overclocked).
I don't know if you've ever used ATITool, but it does all that automatically...My max overclock 565/252 is stable (tested for 6 hours with it). But I haven't tried it on any new games (waiting to get Oblivion...my GPU will suffer ).

xie67

Okay you have DDR DDR2 and DDR3 on the graphics cards the later being the better.
The point of dropping your core clock is to see what the maximum memory clock you can obtain. Obviously you will raise your core clock once you have determined your max memory clock.
Yes I am fully aware of the operation of ATITOOL! I find that by manually raising and lowering the clocks by the method I described affords me a better result.

As you state you are only gainning 2MHz on the memory clock the above was a method in which to verify if you are reaching max memory clocks.

furthermore I am thinking that you have hit find max core and then find max memory.....This is not the best solution, the fastest automated way is not always the best.

thiru

Yes, I did use the find max X button. But I dont see how manually setting the clocks would yield better results. It'd just be less stable clocks that weren't fully tested (since the 'auto' finds some artifacts).

thiru

I knew there was a reason nobody mentioned those in their guides....

0rion

I dont know about this advice, I own an x800xt pe, and I DO adjust those things. I usually adjust the bus to 67mhz, and I upped the voltage for the card to 1.7v. I had an overclock once or twice that the standard 1.5v didnt cut it. If the voltages were left alone, the system would crash when playing games or using the gfx hard. The AGP speed of 8x however, I agree should never be touched. But as for pci bus speed and gfx speed, I would recommend it if you are getting crashes to desktop when gaming.

xie67

Well I guess you have got it all sorted..please disregard any advice from my experiences then.!