whats the difference in overclocking my 8500LE and flashing to a retail BIOS?

[tokamak]

i've been simply overclocking my 3.3ns ram Radeon 8500LE, but i saw something where people were mentioning 'flashing to a retail BIOS'. by that, i assume they mean flashing to a non-LE bios. whats the advantage of that over simply overclocking? does it unlock some extra features or something? should i worry about it?

 

[Brian48]

I would say don't bother. You're not going to get any appreciable advantage doing it other than having the card run at a default 275/275 without manually overclocking. What you will do however, is void the warrantee and expose the card to risk with a potential bad flash.

 

[clicknext]

NOTE: please don't think that what happened to me is what will happen to you

I just got a Radeon8500LE 64MB yesterday. I think it had 3.3ns ram because I couldn't get it over 265mhz without it artifacting all over the place. Anyway, I used the voltage mod here

http://www.xcl-clan.com/articles.php3?id=29

to up the voltage to retail standard. I tried overclocking the ram after I did this, and I still couldn't get it over 265. Just to see if it would do anything, I did the bios flash found here:

http://www.xcl-clan.com/download2.php3?fileid=61

after I did that, the system booted up with 275/275 as default and didn't artifact at all. I don't know why this happened, but it did and now I have a more or less full functioning retail card.

 

[Mingon]

basically the bios on the card supposedly reduces reduces both the core/mem speeds but also the voltage, by flashing the bios you increase the chance of hitting a higher speed.