Is it worth putting RAM sinks onto my Radeon?

[snow patrol]

I've just put a blue orb on my Radeon, and I've also just chucked a FOP32 on my PIII. I can't for the life of me get 3dmark to complete over about 195Mhz.

Question: Now that I have my spare stock P3 heatsink, would it be worth me cutting it up and sticking it to the RAM chips on the Radeon? I reckon I could get it to fit quite nicely and hold it in place with some thermal adhesive. The thing that makes me doubt how much this would help, is that when things start to get 'snowy' in 3dmark, I touch the ram chips on the card and they're warm at most. They're not even hot.

Would putting home made ramsinks on them have any benefit? Thanks for the feedback

 

[SleepyGuy]

No it's not worth it. The Radeon runs very "cool". Would hurt to do it but i think you'll be disappointed by the results. Have fun.

 

[Davegod75]

well 195 is a pretty good OC for a video card. I wouldn' bother with the ram sinks ...you probably just hit the limit of your cards ocing ability

 

[Ajay]

Do the ram chips get really hot when running 3dmark? (Obviously, you'd want to be carefull in testing this!) If so, then heatsinks would help, if not, then they probably wouldn't.

-AJ

 

[snow patrol]

no, as I said. When 3dmark crashes, the ram isn't even hot. I guess it's not really worth it then

 

[Ajay]

Doh! Someday I'll learn to read

-AJ

 

[cmaMath13]

No, I would recommend putting minature heatsink/fan combo on each RAM module. Make sure that you use the correct thermal compound so you get proper cooling. If you do the above, then you should be able to overclock your card by at least 5MHz!

 

[oldfart]

Your Radeon has 6ns ram. 1/.0000000006 = 166 MHz. That is what the ram is rated for. The retail 64 meg cards have 5.5ns ram which is why they are clocked at 183 MHz. To get to 200 Mhz, you would need 5ns ram. If you can run close to 195, thats a pretty good overclock. My 64 retail can hit 205 because of the better ram.

 

[Ajay]

BTW, was it easy to get the ATI heatsink off?
How does the Blorb attach to the gpu/board?

Oh, and what was your max overclock before getting
the blorb (ie, is it worth it). I get 183 w/o mods,
UT blows up after that (with Tribes running, I can
go to 190, if I recall correctly).

Thanks,
-AJ

 

[Shagga]

It shouldn't do any harm. But, it might cause you all sorts of problems with your ADSL line. You might wanna give it someone, who is STILL waiting.

 

[snow patrol]

Shagga - lol, you'll have to prise my adsl from my cold, dead fingers

Ajay - to be honest, I'd say it's probably not worth putting a blorb on a radeon. I think I perhaps gained 2 or 3 Mhz from it. The only reason I put one on is because I literally had it lying around and felt like using it on something. Taking the heatsink off was easy. Slide a credit card underneath it, then prise the heatsink off with a screwdriver..

Blorb does at least look nicer than the stock!

 

[pidge]

I've said it once and I'll say it again. The Radeon is not scalable past around 190MHz. It won't gain much more speed past 190MHz so it is kind of pointless. That is why ATI dropped it down to 183MHz for their high end chip. No need to spend the extra money for more expensive memory when your video card won't benefit much from it. Be happy with the card you have and if you want more speed, get a Geforce 2.

 

[Ajay]

Thanks snow patrol, good info! I'll save my money and be happy with 183Mhz - hopefully I'll find a free overclocking solution before the powerstip trial period ends.

pidge - had a GF2, fast, decent 3d quality, 2d was poor - thought I was going to go blind when I upped the resolution to do some programming

-AJ

 

[snow patrol]

no probs.

 

[oldfart]

Quake 3 1.27 1024 x 768 x 32 SHQ (Super High Quality) settings. Everything max quality, high, to the right, yada yada.

Radeon MHz.......Demo127 FPS
166...............63.2
183...............66
190...............66.8
200...............67.6
205...............67.6

 

[snow patrol]

That doesn't necessarily mean that the Radeon won't perform well with faster RAM. It just means that over 190Mhz, your Radeon is just flaking out a bit.
I'm sure that if there was faster rated memory on the current Radeons, the performance would benefit..

 

[oldfart]

My benchmark shows that it tops out at 200 MHz. I have a retail 64 with 5.5ns ram.

 

[Ajay]

Somewhat strange that it hits a limit like that (that low). I can't figure out why it would top at at those framerates. Based on Geforce card data, Quake can clearly scale higher. I would have to guess that there's a hardware limitation, or the ATI OpenGL drivers can't drive polys any faster because of some inefficient use of resources??!

I don't get it.

-AJ