How high should I overclock my Radeon 9800 Pro?

[MaDfLaMe37]

I'm doing one of those Do It Yourself guides from Maximum PC.

I've never overclocked anything before, but this guide says that overclocking my video card can easily be done through to use of a program called Powerstrip (http://www.entechtaiwan.com/).

The starting info for my card is:
Engine Clock: 378.00 MHz
Memory Clock: 351.00 MHz

The guide says to increase these first only using the Engine Clock at 2 MHz increments. Play a short 3D game and then once you start getting rendering errors you start backing it back down until the card is stable. Then you repeat the process with the Memory Clock.

Right now my Engine Clock is set at 418.50 MHz and my Memory Clock is still at 351.00 MHz. I've been using RavenShield as my 3D game doing the Room Clearing 1 mission (takes about a minute to get through). My FPS has steadily been increasing.

My question to you is how high should I allow myself to overclock? I haven't been getting any rendering errors, but is this level normal without getting rendering errors? Is it too high? Is RavenShield a good game to use in conjunction with this process.

A timely reply is appreciated as I am doing this right now.

Thanks for your help!

 

[MaDfLaMe37]

Alright I had to back down my Engine Clock to 405 MHz, my Memory Clock is now at 378 MHz.

Does that sound like a stable setting to all you guru's?

I started off with 378 MHz and increased it to 405 MHz for the Engine Clock--this increase was exactly 27 MHz.
I started off with 351 MHz and increased it to 378 MHz for the Memory Clock--this is also and exact increase of 27 MHz.
405 MHz minus 378 MHz is exactly a 27 MHz difference--and the beginning numbers (378 and 351) also have a difference of 27 MHz.
Now is this just a really big coincidence or does it mean something?

 

[chilled]

How much should you overclock?

Well if your doing it for fun, then thats upto you - you may want to find the limits of the card.

Otherwise overclock as much as you need to such your low performances are raised to a point where games run satisfactory for you. Personally there are very few games that tax a 9800 PRO - why bother overclocking (unless its out of curiosity?)

 

[Lonyo]

It sounds fine to me. My 9800 non-pro will do 430MHz core and only 325MHz memory, but since oyu have a Pro, the memory is better quality, and should be fine at those speeds.

 

[WHipLAsh13]

You should take it step by step until you see artifacts and then step down one notch. Each board can be different so its hard to say what you should be at.

 

[MaDfLaMe37]

Thanks!

 

[John]

9800XT Speeds are 412/365 and that's what I run my Zalman cooled (all passive) 256MB 9800 Pro at. Try running your memory that high and see if you get artifacts.

 

[caz67]

Run it as high as you can, until you get errors, then back off.

 

[jruff]

Theres some good info on this over at Rage3d
Im able to run my 9800Pro at 465 on the core and 379 on the memory with no heatsinks on the memory.
Theres at least 3 different kinds of memory they used on the pros. All clock alittle differently.

About the best way I found to test the core is with 3DMark03. If the core is to high this bench mark will show a few white dots on the screen. If Ive gone to high this is the only thing that will show it. No game acts up just this bench. If I drop a few mhz or up my cooling on the chip the dots go away. There is Vmods that you can jump potentiometer across the card to up the voltage on the GPU from default 1.6-1.7 up to 1.9-2.1 range but more cooling is a must.
Do a search for ATItool, its a nice overclocking utility that also runs a test and slowly ups the clock speed while spinning a ball. If the program sees a artifact right under that as you best clock speed.

 

[Elcs]

My 9800Pro is happy at 430/375.... playing NFSU @ 1024x768 with x8 AF and x4 AA for a few races.

I also used Aquamark3 to try to gauge where it would artifact but... there are a lot of particles in Aquamark3 and I couldnt decide whether they were in fact particles or they were artifacts... so i went to games 🙂

 

[bob4432]

how many fps and at what resolutions? just curious...