how to use Atitool?

[ockky]

yes i'm an idiot and am wondering how exactly i'm suppose to use this crazy program!

i've tried loading it up and then trying to find a max of the core or mem, and everytime, it either turns the screen pitch black, or it garbles it up with funky colors, which then leads to me restarting my puter.

i know i must be a total idiot and must be missing something somewhere. who's gonna be the 1st to point it out and call me and a fool?

thanks for any help :beer:

oh yea, i'm trying out the latest version of atitool with the 4.7 cats on my x800pro

 

[ockky]

a little help please!

 

[pirred908]

I think it's overclocking your video card too far and thats causeing the screen deformities. I'd be careful if I was you. Don't use ATI tool. Try Radlinker or Radclocker with the Omega Drivers.

 

[SickBeast]

If it's doing that to your computer stop using it!!

I used to have problems with it doing that sort of thing. It doesn't work properly with all cards, and the older versions had all sorts of issues like this.

I would suggest using PowerStrip to overclock your card manually, then test it with loops of 3Dmark03.

 

[ockky]

actually, i was just gonna use it to find out how many pipes i had open. . . don't plan on overclocking at the moment

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: ockky
actually, i was just gonna use it to find out how many pipes i had open. . . don't plan on overclocking at the moment

I don't think atitool can do that. I think 3Dmark03 might be able to. I'm not sure though.

 

[VIAN]

I treated it as a prime95 for videocards. I let ATItool find errors in overclocks within a certain amount of time using the Scan for artifacts button.

 

[ockky]

so, still noone wants to gimme the step-by-step on how to run this sucker. . . . . . all i've been doing is starting it from the directory that it is in, and it brings up the application, and then what? am i suppose to select new? do i go ahead and try to find a max? do i load anything? arrrgh no one is giving me an answer other than, "bah, don't use that piece of crap!" i guess that's a sign tho

 

[Cawchy87]

What kind of card do you have? Did you try a bios flash?

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: ockky
so, still noone wants to gimme the step-by-step on how to run this sucker. . . . . . all i've been doing is starting it from the directory that it is in, and it brings up the application, and then what? am i suppose to select new? do i go ahead and try to find a max? do i load anything? arrrgh no one is giving me an answer other than, "bah, don't use that piece of crap!" i guess that's a sign tho

You don't need to load anything. When you first run atitool (assuming you have no other graphics overclock utility running), your clock is set to default. You just click on find max core rate (or something like that) and let it run for a long time so that it settles. Then, you keep the new core clock and click on find max ram rate and let it run for a long time.
After that settles too, you have a starting point!

Then you can click on new and give it a name. Now, you have a profile that contains the new rates. You can now set your 3D profile to point to this new name.
Now, you play your games, with atitool running in the background. As soon as the game starts, it will load the new clock rates. Every time you see artifacts or you crash to desktop, you need to reduce the clock frequency of the profile until you see no more artifacts and or have no more crashes.

I don't know what you mean when you say you do not want to overclock and just want to know how many pipes you have open! Can you explain what you want?
If you do not want to overclock, you are using the wrong utility (atitool)!

 

[ockky]

well, i plan on modding my x800pro to the x800xt, and i've read in multiple places that alot of people check to see if the mod was successful by first checking out how many pipes atitool said were open 12 or 16.

also, when you do click on the find max button, how long should it run, and will the screen image alter? such as turn black or whatnot? and should i have vpu recover turned on during all of this?

thanks for the 1st real piece of help navid

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: ockky
well, i plan on modding my x800pro to the x800xt, and i've read in multiple places that alot of people check to see if the mod was successful by first checking out how many pipes atitool said were open 12 or 16.

also, when you do click on the find max button, how long should it run, and will the screen image alter? such as turn black or whatnot? and should i have vpu recover turned on during all of this?

thanks for the 1st real piece of help navid

There is a free diagnostic utility that you can download from here:
http://www.lavalys.com/products/download.php?pid=1&lang=en&pageid=3

It gives you all you want to know about anything in your computer, including you graphics card.
Altough, I am not sure about the pipes.

Running atitool for an hour will guarantee that it has stabilized. However, that is no guarantee that there will be no crashes or artifacts in games.
So, if you just want to know what atitool reports, let it run for one hour for core and one hour for memory.

But, if you want to find the maximum clock rate that your card can support and be stable at it, atitool is not enough (at least, in my opinion). You will need to run games and see how it performs and reduce the clock rates until you see no artifacts and have no crashes.

Edit:
The atitool screen shows an object that keeps turning. It should not turn black. If it does, something is wrong. I have never seen that.
Unless you have a crash, in which case, the whole monitor may go black, not just the atitool screen.

I have a very primitive card (9600 pro) compared to what you have. I always have VPU recover on. Then, if I overclock too much and crash, it only crashes to the desktop. If I disable VPU recover and have a crash, I will have to reboot.

 

[ockky]

so if i have atitool running on the desktop, i should see the desktop & atitool and that is it; nothing else special?

thanks for all the help too!

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: ockky
so if i have atitool running on the desktop, i should see the desktop & atitool and that is it; nothing else special?

thanks for all the help too!

What is shown here http://atitool.ocfaq.com/ under "Screenshots" is what you will see when you run atitool as a small window on your desktop. The rest of your desktop should not be affected unless you have artifacts due to overclocking that is more than your system can handle.

What is the temperature of your GPU before you start atitool?
You should be able to see the temperature on the overdrive tab.
What is your case temperature?

 

[fbrdphreak]

Let's get a clarification here: Have you already performed the 12-to-16 pipe mod or what? If you already performed the mod and are trying to find out if you have all 16 pipes, but the screen goes black and reboots it sounds like you may have FUBARred your perfectly good X800 Pro. If NOT and you haven't tried the mod already, then you have a problem. Make sure you are using the latest version of ATI Tool. I used it to OC my 9800 Pro and it worked great. When you do the "Find Max Core" or "Find Max Mem," it will open up a little side window displaying a cube. From time to time it will animate the cube and render it in 3D, thus utilizing the 3D accelerator part of your X800 to test for stability. If you don't see that and it crashes on you, then there's a problem. It MIGHT be with ATI Tool because a lot of people have had trouble with it. If you can't get it to work right, try RadLinker or the other program that somebody mentioned. And last question, if you aren't very competent with using simple software, why are you overclocking your perfectly fast $400 video card? Jeez

 

[ockky]

must we be so rude?!

if you would have read, i have not, NOT, touched the card yet but PLANNNN too. i've overclocked plenty of times, but this is the 1st time i've ever used atitool. why are you gonna get all pissy with me when i ask a simple question? if it bothers you, don't read it, and better yet, try not answering like . . .sigh. . .see what happens, now i'm all pissy. . .

lol, anyhow, thx navid

if i figure out what is going on, i'll be sure to get this thread back kickin

oh yea, and my temp is 44c idle

just tried turning on vpu recover, then running max mem, and as soon as i pressed the button my whole screen turned into the rainbow :shocked: and froze the system again

guess i'll give up and move on to something new

ps... no one has to say anything about me being an ass because it's clear above . . .my bad

 

[Navid]

There are other tools you can use for overclocking like Radlinker
http://www28.brinkster.com/chrisww1942/.

To see how many piplines there are, download Everest from the link that I posted and look under "GPU', which is under "Display".
Also, you can start atitool, but, don't click on "Find max core" or "Find max Mem". Just click on "Settings" and you can see how many "active pipelines" you have on the card.

 

[MDE]

To find the number opf active pipelines click settings (lower right hand corner).

 

[ockky]

lol it may be because i've drank one tomany beers, but lol, i' dont see none settings ?! i's got an idea toug!

crap! dind't work, tried to take a screen shot. .. :beer:

holy sh!t, i jsst compared witht he webpage, and my atitoll dones t evne loolk like that! what the fvk!

mwhahah, just redownloaded it, and now i have hte button, time for ertstart. . .

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Navid
Running atitool for an hour will guarantee that it has stabilized. However, that is no guarantee that there will be no crashes or artifacts in games.
So, if you just want to know what atitool reports, let it run for one hour for core and one hour for memory.

But, if you want to find the maximum clock rate that your card can support and be stable at it, atitool is not enough (at least, in my opinion). You will need to run games and see how it performs and reduce the clock rates until you see no artifacts and have no crashes.

Edit:
The atitool screen shows an object that keeps turning. It should not turn black. If it does, something is wrong. I have never seen that. Unless you have a crash, in which case, the whole monitor may go black, not just the atitool screen.

I have a very primitive card (9600 pro) compared to what you have. I always have VPU recover on. Then, if I overclock too much and crash, it only crashes to the desktop. If I disable VPU recover and have a crash, I will have to reboot.

What about loading ATITool, opening the 3D view window, and then just letting it run, at stock card speeds, for an hour? The two times that I've tried that, when I go back to looking at the image being displayed, it is severely "warped", looks like some wierd Star-Trek-ish nebula thing, I think I have a pic here somewhere.

This is on an FIC Radeon 9200 64MB AGP 8x card, on an MSI KT4V-L mobo, AMD XP2000 CPU, W2K SP2, ocfaq.com "softmod" drivers (to allow bypassing of the "clock lock" for my card).

Yet, even though ATITool seems to get easily buggered up, I can play UT2K4 online for hours at a time with no issues. I think that ATITool is just severely buggy, or incompatible with this card, or something.

Edit: Oh, and if I set to to check for artifacts, it slows down my machine to a crawl - it seems to take up easily 90% of my 1.6Ghz XP CPU speed to check for artifacts, which seems ... excessive. I don't understand it. I have a dual-boot system with WinXP SP1, and it takes a lot of CPU time as well, but not as much as in W2K, for some reason. (Different DirectX versions?)

 

[Navid]

When you overclock anything (CPU, memory, or GPU) and you want to have a stable system, you have to stress what you are overclocking to find out if it can handle it or not. That is the basis of checking for stability when overclocking.

Just because the system boots, does not mean that it is going to be OK always. When the system is under load, it gets warm and heat reduces the maximum operating frequency.
So, you want to put what you are overclocking under load so that it heats up, as much as it is ever going to get hot, and make sure that its performance is acceptable to you. If not, you back up the overclock and repeat until you find the right overclock rate.

Atitool is a tool that heps you stress your graphics card, the way you use memtest to stress your memory. But, after using it, you should still tweak your system for final fine tuning. So, it helps you speed up the long and tedious initial part of trying different clock rates.

I have absolutely no idea which card can use atitool and which card cannot (compatibility of atitool).