Got an aftermarket HS on your "shimless" Radeon?

Don't feel stupid like I am I've got a little POS socket 7 heatsink that I attached to my 9500np using a pair of screws and some rubber feet as insulators and psuedo core-protectors. So far it's been doing awesome for overclocks -- 385 on stock voltage (1.28vgpu) isn't much to complain about.

So I'm looking at the card again today thinking about doing the VGPU voltmod, and suddenly started looking closer at the heatsink... Turns out, the damned thing wasn't on 100% straight -- it was clamped down a little further one on side than the other. (lucky I didn't chip the core being that dumb)

Loosened up the screw just a touch on that one side, tightened the other side down, goofed around with it until I had it dead-straight all the way around the core. Turns out I had another 13.5mhz in there waiting to get out 398.25 baby, yeah!

Ok, so now it's time for a light voltmod so I can punt it to 425.25 or higher

Anyway you can get some pics up? I've been thinking about doing that to mine - it runs at 375 on the stock cooling but I'd like some more. I checked out the other thread that 1-Man-Army made about sticking a stock AMD HSF on there, but I'm looking to see some work others have done.

All I have here is a flatbed scanner, so let's see if I can get that to take "pictures" for us

Lol, good luck. I'm looking around to see if I have anything suitable for sticking on my 9500np. I've been itching to upgrade, but if I can vmod and cool my card then maybe that'll hold me for a while.

This looks like it would be sweet for a video card. A little pricey though.

1.28? Are you sure that's not Vref or something? Ussually Vgpu is stock at around 1.5... mine is at like 1.81 lol.

Ya, thats really low for gpu. If you are clocking that high on 1.28vgpu, then get ready for some nice gains after the vmod.

You guys were right, I was one number off on the VGPU. Stock readings from the card were:

VDD = 2.85
VDDQ = 2.50
VREF = 1.25
VGPU = 1.38

Right now I'm running VDD = 3.23 and VDDQ = 3.02

Figure if I put the VGPU at a true 1.5v, I should see quite a bit of improvement. I'm still waiting on that though... By the way, I had basically zero luck on that flatbed scanner picture But I think I know a way I can get it to work with a bit of trickery...

Woah! I was thinking my card had about reached it's limit (it does 390-400 with stock cooling), but if you got another 13Mhz just by getting the HS seated correctly, I think I may just upgrade my HS

JigPu

Most that mine would do on 100% absolute stock cooling was like 344 or thereabouts. After lapping the stock heatsink, ripping off the shim and using a dab of Radio Shack thermal grease, it would do 351 reliably. After using the Socket7 sink, it would hit 378-385 depending on which BIOS I used.

I can now get it to 398 with EVERYthing I throw at it, with one noteable exception: My very last reliability test is turning the OpenGL preferences in the ATI panel to all the highest levels (6xAA, 16xAF, VSYNC off, all texture bias sliders to max) and then running a certain alpha version of a four-lettered application starting with "D" (we're not allowed to talk about it here )

I consider that D-word app to be my end-all decision if the card is stable, because I've found that even after an hour of looping 3DMark03 along with another several hours of UT2K3, I can still find problems when I crank this D-app up to it's max.

And sure enough, at 1280x1024 with every feature enabled (using the R200 rendering path rather than the ARB) it will blow up in a matter of just minutes. Turn the card back down to 385 and it's suddenly stable again for hours. Bleh

I removed the shim on my AIW9700pro and installed a Vantec Iceberq4. The max o/c I've been able to hit is 366 MHz core and 333 MHz for the memory.

I'd say you've got an unusually good GPU... don't kill it.