Radeon 8500 Problem

[Wetling23]

Okay, I had an LELE (clocked at 230/230) and I ran 3DMark 2001SE on it with the 6025's. I got a score of 6700ish.

Today I picked up a retail 8500, added some pencil marks as indicated in this picture by the blue marks. I penciled in to the left of the top one, and to the bottom of the bottome one (that'll make sense if you look at the pic).

I then sprayed on some hair spray and installed it. It seems to be running fine at default, but when I ran 3DMark (275/275), I got a score of 3331 :Q

I'm running WinXP and the 6025's. I started out OC'd to 300/300 with the 6043's and 3DMark locked the system so I rolled back the driver and the clock speed at the same time.

What the heck is going on?
(PS, I'm trying to get registered at rage3d to post there too, but the confirmation email isn't coming through)

Thanks.

 

[sc0tty8]

Use power strip to confirm what your speeds are on the mem/core. I do not see how they would drop after modding it with a pencil. I do not use benchmarks. As long as I am getting great video in my games, thats all I care about. I own a retail 8500 with tin plated ram sinks and a corb on it, never tried to see how fast it could go. Not yet. Have you tried to take the pencil/hair spray off the card? What is the hair spray for? I pensiled in my duron and my athlon, but never did anything with hair spray....

 

[Wetling23]

I did use power strip.

Someone mentioned that they used hair spray because the pencil was coming off and the spray prevented that.

 

[Wetling23]

Okay, it was a driver problem. I did a through uninstall of the driver and now I'm getting 8100ish in 3DMark. Whew.

 

[Killrose]

You should not have to use the pencil trick on a retail 8500. Only if you are trying for a higher overclock(in the range of 300MHz) on the Ram/Core. You ought to also use a voltmeter after penciling to check the voltage.

The LE would have been the card to modify. Not the Retail.

 

[Wetling23]

The pencil trick was really conceived to get LE memory and core voltage up to the level of full retail cards (1.75/3.65V). But people found they could push their retail cards even further with it, so it's not really for one or the other.

http://discussions.hardwarecentral.com/Forum3/HTML/016395.html

 

[Killrose]

That's true. It actually was conceived for the 250/250 OEM cards, even before the LE 230/230 showed up. And yes, it may help you acheive higher clocks on any 8500. The stock voltages reported by most Retail owners and the people resposible for this trick is actually 1.62core 3.5-3.6vmem. Where they that got 1.75volts for a stock core reading is beyond me.