Overclocking a 9800 pro?

ionapaul

How can I overclock my 9800 pro? I bought it from newegg.com in March - no idea which exact model I bought and no clue what core I have. Use the stock cooler that came with the card.
Haven't needed to overclock it for any games I currently have, but want to be ready for Doom 3

Stephen

it can all be done via handy software within windows - if you download the omega drivers (www.omegadrivers.net) they come with tools for overclocking built in (RadLinker i think its called).

Zakalwe

Originally posted by ionapaul
How can I overclock my 9800 pro? I bought it from newegg.com in March - no idea which exact model I bought and no clue what core I have. Use the stock cooler that came with the card.
Haven't needed to overclock it for any games I currently have, but want to be ready for Doom 3

Download ATItool. It will progressively overclock your card as much as it can wthout artifacts apperaring.

http://atitool.ocfaq.com/

You can also flash to a 9800 XT bios, but you really need to know the exact card details down to the RAM type and speed. The overclock will do just fine.

I bet ATI are working REALLY hard on improving OpenGL performance right now

Jammer

Use ATi Tool to see what core you have. If its R360 then your good for XT speeds!

bambam

and stick on a artic cooling vga silencer
cheap as chips and works a treat :

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Other_Coolers_57.html

top of the page

jozi

I might be getting one soon when i get a 9800pro but whats the exchange rate now for pound to euro?

Jozi

Jammer

Arctic Cooler is 15 euro in peats and PC world. got one day before yesterday!

Zakalwe

Originally posted by Jammer
Use ATi Tool to see what core you have. If its R360 then your good for XT speeds!

Not quite. Some cards may require a volt mod to get up to XT speeds.

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=108&var2=0


edit: Whoops, you said 360 core. The volt mod is only sometimes needed on the 350 core.

ionapaul

Originally posted by bambam
and stick on a artic cooling vga silencer
cheap as chips and works a treat :

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Other_Coolers_57.html

top of the page

Can I still oc it ok without changing the stock cooler?

Is using ATItool to 'turn' the 9800 pro into a 9800 XT the same as oc'ing it, or is this a different operation entirely?

Calibos

You can still overclock it with the stock cooler but not quite as high as you could if you had better cooling. I got an arctic cooler from Peats as it turns out what with exchange rate and p&p they were virtually the same price as OCUK. Imagine peats actually being competitively priced for something!!!

Atitool doesn't change your card into an XT. Its an 'auto' overclocking utility. You can overclock with other utilities manually where you would bump up the clock frequencies of the core and memory a few mhz each time, run a graphics intensive benchmark like 3d mark 2003 or a game like Far Cry etc. If the card/game/benchmark is stable with no artifacts for a while you would then bump up the clocks another few mhz and run the bench/game etc again and so on, until such time as you get artifacts. Then you would drop the mhz back down to the last stable Overclock settings and then you're done. What atitool does is do this automatically. ie it automatically ups the clocks, runs its own graphics intensive demo, checks for artifacts etc etc The thing about atitool though is that it is very sensitive so that if it even detects one pixel out of place (ie artifacts that you can't even see) it wont increase the clocks anymore. People who really want to push their cards to the edge prefer to do it manually and rely on visual artifacts to let them know when to stop. People who want to overclock but don't want to risk pushing their card to the very edge find atitools overclocks safer.

Turning your pro into an xt is different although it does include running the card at XT default clocks which is in effect an overclock too. You turn your pro into an XT by flashing the pro cards bios with an xt bios You'll need a working floppy or bootable cdr for this though and the appropriate flash programs and XT bios to match your card memory type. The thing is that there is no point in flashing to XT bios unless you have a R360 GPU core on your card. The only way to know for certain is to remove the heatsink/cooling and check what is printed on the GPU itself. You can't rely on atitool or any other utility to tell you which core you have because the utility just reports what the pro bios tells it. ie my Sapphire atlantis 9800pro 128mb was reported in atitool as having the R350 core but when I took the heatsink off to fit my arctic cooler it turns out that I did have an R360 core. It also turns out that I have an XT PCB so I had the temp monitoring chip too! So basically now after flashing my card to XT I in effect have an XT except with 128mb ram instead of 256mb on a real XT.

So basically if you want to overclock you should replace the stock cooler with something like an arctic cooler anyway. When you are fitting that you can check which core you have. If you have an R350 core there is no point in flashing it to XT but you can still overclock and apparently the R350s overclock higher than an R360 in many cases. If you find you have an R360 core you can flash the card to XT. The default clocks for an XT are 412/365 so if you are running the card as an XT you would also be in effect overclocking the mhz from the standard pro clocks of 378/338 to 412/365. You can probably still overclock your 'XT' higher aswell. My game stable clock is 435/380 compared to the 378/338 when my card was a 'standard' pro! :D

ARGINITE

A few people have had bad experences with ATItool and its auto overclock feature, they let it run to long (over night) to find the max mem and core and it fryed the card. so keep an eye on it if you decied to go this route when using ATItool.