a very interesting utility

[Sylvanas]

here i havent tried it personally but it sounds good. since this is only the first installment of this utility theres bound to be some bugs (as some people have expressed in the article) so use at your own risk.

note: this is only for radeon cards. sorry nv owners

(sorry if this is a repost)

 

[powerMarkymark]

Has anyone here tested the waters, I have two Ati 9800 Pros and an Ati 9500 Pro so this interests me.

 

[JBT]

Interesting... May have to take alook when I get home.

 

[duragezic]

I dunno about this. Ram timings aren't all that important for system memory (not that they can't be tweaked for better performance but it's not huge) so I don't see how good this would be for video card memory. I think I would rather pass on this brand-new program. I won't chance a possible tiny increase in performance for mucking up my 9800 pro!

 

[ShawnD1]

*edit*


That program is excellent! My score in GL Excess improved by 13% just by changing the CAS latency from 4.0 to 3.0
Here's the breakdown. My system is an Athlon3200+ with a Radeon 9600XT

Original BIOS (CAS latency 4.0)
fill rate: 8825
polygon count: 10495
VRAM: 5212
CPU/FPU: 8376
overall score: 9274

New BIOS (CAS latency 3.0)
fill rate: 9756 (11% higher)
polygon count: 12586 (20% higher)
VRAM: 6562 (26% higher)
CPU/FPU: 8688 (4% higher)
overall score: 10484 (13% higher)

My core and ram are overclocked as high as they were before and still without any artifacts. Great find .

 

[Sylvanas]

wow those are some excellent results, i might try it out on my own rig.

 

[duragezic]

Ok ok... if we get some more results like that than I will admit I got pwned. :disgust:

 

[pookie69]

Sorry - im stupid i know

Erm... where is this BIOS im supposed to open and then mod? Should i make a backup of it first? Cos at the mo i just open the utility and all the options are blanked out.

Thank you and sorry for being dumb again.

EDIT: just searched the BIOS file extensions on my system and tried to open a few images i thought might be it - in system32 folder for eg, but no they werent it... so is the BIOS not on my system then? Do i have to d/l it from someplace? What do i do after ive modded it then?

HMMM... me thinks this is too complicated for me... i should perhaps leave well alone before i mess things up totally... maybe when im wiser ill have a look ... but for now im too dumb

 

[Viper96720]

Yea you should leave it alone. BTW the bios is your video cards one.

 

[Sylvanas]

i couldnt find my bios so i went to gigabyte.com or whatever and downloaded my vid cards bios from there. opened the package then all the options are there for tweaking. though you do have to flash your vid card bios which is too risky for me. so i might wait until a vid card real time cas tweaker comes out...

 

[PliotronX]

CAS3 caused scrambled letters for my 9700p at POST, blind flashing fixed it back up though. Also tried a 9800p BIOS with the timings tuned up to the 9700p level but that resulted in corruptions at POST (flashing colors whoo!). Then I tried tRCD from 4 to 3, and it seemed fine until it came to Windows. Then certain icons were missing and the cursor had black dots on it :Q I finally tried tRP from 6 to 4 and it works just fine in 2D and 3D, garnered a nice few FPS. I also have tRAS from 9 to 8 and it's fine there too. This is with clocks at 378/351 as well

Neat tool

BTW Sylvanas & Pookie, you can save the BIOS from your very own cards by using the -s switch with the flashing program under real-mode DOS. Then you tweak that dumped file till your heart's content, save it to a different filename, go back into RMD and flash it. You can set up batch files to help with blind flashing if something goes awry. If you can't blindly flash, a cheap PCI card will work and when you flash, it won't flash the PCI card but only the AGP card (as long as the address of 0 is specified in the command line ).