9600XT OC Issues... Please Advise!

[chazdraves]

I know in Anandtechs latest review of the 6800UE they had the 9700 and the 9800 running on cat 4.4 drivers. I currently have the latest cats (4.7) but can't get a very high O/C on 'em, plus I"ve even had crashing at default clock speeds (ummm...). Is 4.4 a good way to go for the older cards? Is there an even better non-ATI driver out there for the 9600XT? Thanks!

- Chaz

 

[SneakyStuff]

On all my cards, ATI or nVidia, I use the current official drivers, just for compatability. Look at benchmark reviews, and they usually do too. The alternative for the catalyst drivers are the Omega drivers in ATI's case, do a google on them. Good luck

 

[chazdraves]

Is there any particular driver that works best for the 9600XT? I have mine running at 33C after an hour of Far Cry with 50MHz OC Core and 40MHz OC Mem, but it still crashes, at 33C... any ideas what's causing this? It was running at 40C with factory HSF and factory speeds with no crashes...

- Chaz

 

[chazdraves]

Anybody???

 

[AristoV300]

I agree I just use the latest official ATI cats, 4.7 is the latest. I very much doubt that the driver is causing the card failure. Are you overclocking your system besides the vc?

 

[PrayForDeath]

What kind of craches do you get? Does the game crash to desktop? Does the computer restarts? Doest that happend after # Minutes of playing?

 

[chazdraves]

Well, I do have my FSB overclocked a fair way (A64 3000+ at 2.3GHz). The crashes I get are just straight freezes... the game just stops and all the sound just cuts and it's over. I just did an hour-and-a-half of Far Cry and I got it up to a whoppin' 36C with core at 540MHz and DDR at 330MHz... Any ideas what's causing it?

- Chaz

Edit - Right now I have Cat 4.7 with FastWrite off and VPU Recover off because it hasn't been working anyhow...

 

[AristoV300]

Well since your ocing your FSB is your AGP/PCI locked at 66/33. If not that will tend to cause those types of problems.

 

[chazdraves]

You seem to have hit the nail on the head... I was just playin WarCraft III: Frozen Throne for about 1.5 hours and the VGA suddenly wigged out as did my only other AGP/PCI device - my wireless adapter... Don't know why it hasn't happened before with the wireless, but that seems to be it... I just turned my FSB back down to 210 and everything is working fine again... we'll see if this helps my OC on the vid card, cause my card was at 33C when it crashed this time... Does this seem to make sense to anyone?

- Chaz

 

[chazdraves]

Allright, here's the update... I've now taken my FSB all the way back down to default clock speeds and that doesn't seem to have solved the problem.. I'm sure I won't have to worry about my AGP/PCI locking up at this point, but that hasn't fixed whatever's no good with the vid card... Here's how it happens"

I'll try setting the overclock to, let's say 570MHz up from 500... I'll launch FarCry. All the beginning vids will play just great. I open up the options tab so it renders the small 3d avatar under the multiplayer settings and it freezes... We pause and wait, VPU recover catches it and I continue for another 12 seconds before it freezes again and then resets. Finally, I exit Far Cry, look at my temp for the vid card and see 33C... It sure as heck ain't getting hot enough to freeze... I'm not even getting artifacts... the only way I get artifacts is by OCing the memory too high... With core it just locks up until VPU catches it... The hardware is doin' great, that's why it seems like such a software thing too me, but I know there are folks (though I don't expect anything this crazy) that have their core up to 770MHz and I can't even get 570, despite the fact that my cooling system is far superior to the factory HSF... does anybody have an answer? I've got an AMD 64 3000+ now set to factory defaults as are all my voltages and speeds... I'm running that in a Asus K8V (yeah, I know, shoulda gotten something with AGP/PCI lock) on 1.5GB of RAM (generic stuff on sale at Best Buy), 1xPC3200, 2xPC2700 aligned in their appropriate configuration... The case (not that this should have anything to do with it) is a Chieftec Dragon with a Antec 480w True Blue power supply... I'm running a Zalman Heatsink kit on the 9600Xt with RAMsinks in addition and a P4 CPU cooler from Aero running at around 4000RPMs blowing right onto the heatsink over the core to keep it at that wonderful 33C, not to mention the side fan on my case blowing right onto the vid card as well...

Anyone know the answer to this? it's gonna drive me crazy...

I greatly appreciate your advice, tips, and opinions, not too mention any random flames...

- Chaz

EDIT: Just as a side note... I can run anything in Windows just peachy-dandy... it's only when I open up something fullscreen 3D that it wigs... It's at 570 as I type, but there's obviously no real load on it at the moment... thanks again...

 

[Cawchy87]

same thing happens to me, you simply need more voltage to the card. The gpu can't do all those calculations on stock voltage so it just shuts down basicly. without voltmodding your card you won't be able to get any higher overclocks. P.S. 9600xt uses very little voltage compaired to the 9700/9800/next gen cards in the first place

 

[chazdraves]

You, my friend, deserve an award for being the first to figure that out! Makes perfect sense to me... I think I'm gonna get a x800 sometime this week, so I'm not gonna void my return chances by trying to vmod this thing, but I'm glad somebody finally figured it out for me, I don't mind the problem just so long as I can know what it is!

- Chaz

 

[Blastman]

Are you running AGP at 8x? If so try 4x.

edit: ALso, try reseating the card.

 

[chazdraves]

The card has been reseated a couple times, I'm afraid... You think 4x would work better? Is that less power-consuming than 8x? Just wondering... I'll give it a try right now and let yah know if it worked!

- Chaz

 

[chazdraves]

Well, it was certainly the most successful tip thus far! I've gotten another 20MHz outta that... still can't run it high enough to even warm it up, but I'm not sure I can go any farther with out doing a vmod and voiding that warranty/return policy I'll be takin' advantage of in a couple days... Any comments/thoughts/suggestions/ideas?

- Chaz

 

[SickBeast]

I'm no expert on the 9600-based cards, but 570mhz sounds hella fast. It's probably at the upper limit of what the chip can do, and that's why it's unstable. Try running everything at stock speeds, then see if you have crashes. If you don't, then you know that you have an unsuccessful overclock.

Just by the way, the drivers you use should not affect the overclockability of your graphics card. The only thing that can affect that in my experience is a new BIOS. It could be the warmer weather that is affecting how fast your machine can run. I had to back my Mobile Athlon XP down from 2500mhz to 2400mhz for this reason.

 

[Cawchy87]

570 is a very very good over clock for 9600 cards. Never seen that one high before.

 

[jhurst]

I have a 9600XT and 570 is about the max for my core. But my question is the 330.....I know its only a 30mhz OC...but the memory on these cards does not like to be tweaked with much. I currently have mine set @ 560/325, anything over 325 and I'm not 100% stable. Don't worry about your video card temp remaining low, if the chips don't like that much frequency, they just don't like it, regardless of heat/voltage.

 

[Blastman]

Originally posted by: chazdraves

You think 4x would work better? Is that less power-consuming than 8x? Just wondering... I'll give it a try right now and let yah know if it worked!

- Chaz

Some motherboard/graphic cards are finicky at 8xAGP.

8x seems to push the some AGP chipsets very close to their limit -- and then if you overclock, things may not work to well. 8xAGP has no performance benefits over 4xAGP -- which is plenty fast.

I?ve seen tests where even 2xAGP proved fast enough. 1xAGP didn?t quite cut it and 2xAGP was faster. But past 2xAGP the performance benefits are virtually nothing.

 

[chazdraves]

Well, I suppose if my board supported it I'd try 2x just for the fun of it, but I know I've heard as well that there's no diff between 4x and 8x, this baffles me then as to why they're coming out with PCI Express when AGP 8x is still faster than what we're using by quite a lot... Anyhow, are there any other little BIOS things I could potentially change and see some benefit? For example, I cureently have FastWrite on and my Aperature size set to 256MB... would those yield any results? Thanks a bunch for the info/help!

- Chaz

 

[chazdraves]

jhurst -

I know that before I put RAMsinks on my 9600, I couldn't go beyond 325 with my mem either... I put those babies on though and right now I'm sittin' at 347. As I remember it artifacts at 350 or 360, but I haven't tried pushing it for a while... That's good news too, it doesn't do that bloody "not enough voltage, *click*" thing like the core does, I CAN push the mem to it's limit without modding. Anyhow, if you have any RAMsinks sittin' around, give it a try, fixed it right up for me!

- Chaz

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: chazdraves
but I'm not sure I can go any farther with out doing a vmod and voiding that warranty/return policy I'll be takin' advantage of in a couple days... Any comments/thoughts/suggestions/ideas?

- Chaz

Yeah. You already voided the warranty by OCing the card (as well as replacing the heatsink, unless you got a Sapphire "Ultimate" 9600XT that came with that Zalman cooler on there). Just so you know.

 

[chazdraves]

Yeah... but it's just so easy to revert back, heh

- Chaz

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: chazdraves
Yeah... but it's just so easy to revert back, heh

- Chaz

And to think we wonder why prices are so high on the new cards. :frown:

 

[Marsumane]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: chazdraves
Yeah... but it's just so easy to revert back, heh

- Chaz

And to think we wonder why prices are so high on the new cards. :frown:

That cant be the reason why. The real reason why, is because of the existance of the type of ppl that roam these forums. The majority of people that come to these forums will pay the price, and thats y they are so high. It actually costs them im sure less then $25 to make the actual card.