Third time lucky Radeon 9800pro vga silencer 3.0 overclock HELP???

This is my third post (other 2 are on guru3d) to try and get an answer to my prob. This time ill put info about my card first to minimize confusion.

Sapphire radeon 9800 pro lite retail.

ON GPU DIE DETAILS:

ATI (logo)
R360
215R9RBKA11F
N02402.30
0334AA
Taiwan

RAM DETAILS:
SAMSUNG 349
K4D263238E - GC2A (2.86ns Checked from chart here)
WVK049GBA

In radlinker the card is 256bit 128mb.

GPU DIE
Cooler used vga silencer 3.0 installed = yes
Thermal paste = Arctic silver 3

RAM
Cooler used = No

Currently using original bios "radeon 9800 pro"

So problem? well you can see from the details that it is a r360 core and the cooling is well substancial to get running at least past 415 mhz core....

BUT this is not the case.. I use ati tool to find max core overclock and i keep getting to max core of 405mhz? WTF is going on? I see a good few posts of people getting overclocks of 415-420 at least and thats from a freakin 9800 non-pro.

My bios settings are correctly set at fastwrites off and agp frequency at 66mhz.

Used driver cleaner and have done a clean install of cat 4.7 beta
But no matter what i try to do i still keep getting max overclock at 405.00 This is bollox man.

Is there a problem With ATItool ver 0.20? or am i doing something wrong?

Hopefully somone can get me an answer this time cuz right now i have no idea what to do to get this bloody card to at least upto 415mhz core (reason being i want to do the xt flash) but until then I am stuck with 9800 pro at 405mhz 5953 score on 3d mark which is ok but im not satisfied cuz i bought the vga silencer with expectations much higher than that.

ATI tool doesn't always work, try setting the oc manually and then test for artifacts yourself in 3dmaark.

ATItool works for others?

ATI tool seems to work for others and teh program does do what its meant to do on i.e clock up slightly test for errors etc and always get same result.. soon as it reaches anywhere near 411mhz core it starts firing errors up and then lowering the clock down to 405 before the errors stop.. However you may be right as i did the xt mod after i installled the vga silencer before and at default speed i got all the way through 3dmark03 without any artifacts appearing ... well non that i could see anyway.

Before i installed the silencer i couldnt get through 3dmark 3 game test 3 without artifacts. However im still worried about manually overclocking without ati tool as seeing artifacts is less accurate than sensing them with ati tool.

Just dont wanna end up ruining my card. But at the same time get some help on the issue.

i forgot to say

Welcome to the Forums!!!

and idk some people just cant get ati tool to work with their card. there are some users here where ati tool actually brings the speeds lower than stock

ok ill give it a go manually

will try it with rthdribl instead of 3dmark3 as i think this might be a more stressfull test and can spot artifacts easier with it.

thanks for the welcome glad to be aboard

the reason your card has a R360 core might be that it couldn't cut it at XT speeds. So they binned it as a Pro core instead.

yeh!

I think you could be right there mate.. ah well i guess ill have to live with it.. but honestly i thought most cards could reach well past certan speeds with adequate cooling sigh!

i woudln't give up yet man, im telling you ati tool isn't always perfect.

rthdribl

tried using radlinker and rthdrible together if i push clock past 405 the floating balls start to give odd white flashes now and again if i reduce to 400 they dissapear so i clocked it to just 405 and now mem at 365.50 funny thing is memory clocks up great but core just aint upto it bloody nuisance too after i bought that vga silencer to be able to run xt bios with my r360 chip but looks like it aint gonna happen. snif

I have a pro soft modded to Xt that is running at 470/370, just for contrast. Make sure to keep us updated on how high your able to eventually get it.

Sorry to hear about your bum o/c man. It does sound like your card has topped out though. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot more you can do to remedy it.

Well only thing i havent tried is removing the shim. Its the last option i have left i think. will update once ive done that.

if you didn't remove the shim, are you sure the silecer is making proper contact with the core? iv heard of the shim causing alot of problems