Radeon LE issues

[Serori]

What exactly is Flashing my BIOS on the card? What will it do for me?

Will it increase preformance any more than if I just overclocked and enabled HyperZ?

Has anyone not been able to overclock to the retail version?

Should I even bother considering a fan for the card? I heard it does essentially nothing?

Anything else I should be aware of?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[GT578]

Flashing bios really does nothing except raise the default speed. I'm sure you can find out more if you do a search in the forum. Just use a tweaker program. Fan always helps but its most likely the rams that will hold the speed back before the core. Mine is set at 191/191 which is way more than I expected considering I was originally just going to use it at 166/166 like the retail speed and with hyper-z on.

 

[alluu]

Flashing is just replacing the LE bios with the retail bios.

It should not give anymore performance benefits than simply tweaking the card. Just saved you the time of overclocking and enabling hyperz when you first install the card. Flashing just lets you say "I have a retail version" nothing more.

You can still overclock.

The fan is more of a peace of mind thing than anything. At 166, you should be okay without the fan cause the LE heatsink is actually better than the retail. Any higher, it wouldn't hurt as fans are so cheap. I don't think having a fan allows you to overclock any higher, it just simply keeps it cooler. I have mine without a fan at 192 but running it at 183 just to be safe.

 

[Soccerman]

what are the nanosecond ratings typically on Radeon LE cards RAM?

 

[merlocka]

>Flashing bios really does nothing except raise the default speed.

Flashing the bios to the retail DDR bios will raise the default clock speed to 166MHz (a majority of LE's can run at this speed or higher, 180-190 seems the sweet spot) as well as enable hyper-z by default.

If you are gonna run the tweaker programs anyway, flashing isn't helpful. If you don't want to mess around with the tweaker programs and are confident your card can run at 166MHz (and you are confident with flashing) then go ahead and flash it.

Adding cooling never hurt, except that one time the Blue orb bit my finger when I was making sure it was spinning. Dang, those little blades have an edge on them.

I believe the ram on LE's is 6ns but I reserve the right to be wrong.