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Whats better ot overclock more, GPU or RAM?

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rus

Registered
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Aug 22, 2004
Basically i installed VGA Silencer Rev4 +AS5 on my 9600pro (true ati w/samsung ram) few days ago. I was experimenting, and found out with AtiTool that max i can push my GPU was 490(400original) and my RAM 350 (300original)

now the question, where would i get more perforamce boost? pushing my GPU or pushing RAM? or both? I know each card has her own so called "sweet spot" at overclocing, and its different for every card.

the good thing is, without VGA Silencer my ram would only go up to 320, with VGA Silencer it does 345 easy!

currently running at 475/345 (400/300) with no problems, woot! :clap:
 
Both.

Find the sweet spot for the memory and then find the sweet spot for the card. Wont go wrong that way ;).
 
Like you said, you are most likely going to have to find out for yourself. The Ti 4600 in my sig gets up to 320/770, but, in a recent benchmark I went from 12,800 in 3dMark01 with 320/770, to 13,600 with 324/743. You pretty much just have to change settings and do a bunch of benchmarking to find your so-called sweet spot.
 
Seabee said:
Like you said, you are most likely going to have to find out for yourself. The Ti 4600 in my sig gets up to 320/770, but, in a recent benchmark I went from 12,800 in 3dMark01 with 320/770, to 13,600 with 324/743. You pretty much just have to change settings and do a bunch of benchmarking to find your so-called sweet spot.

maybe you were getting a negative o/c as the ram was throwing up errors.

I found the best way was to find the max Core then the max Ram. watching the benchmarks near the limit of each as you'll often get a negative overclock (no artifacts but Bencmark score decreases instead of scalingwith the mhz increase).

Did some tests a while back and we found that the sweet spot was cranking both to the max stable O/C. Click here

EDIT: Sorry back on-topic
Core or memory speed, a moot point really since with a properly cooled card your not going to have one at the expence of the other, core temp will effect memory O/C, so O/C your Core first and find the stable no artifact point, then do the Ram.

The benefits in terms of performance, i suppose each mhz increase with the core yeilds the biggest FPS boost, but ram overclocking gives a good boost expecially with higher IQ settings. Ram overclocking will really help when you use AA & AF as well as lots of large textures.
 
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It depends upon the graphics card. A 9600 definitely benefits more from high memory clock speeds, as they're general starved for memory bandwidth (hence crappy performance at 1600x1200 and with AA turned on), but compared to the previous generation FX cards, they do much better than Nvidia with core intensive engines (DX9 stuff) at lower resolutions. The most important overclock for an ATi card has traditionally been the memory bus, and for Nvidia cards (like the 4600 mentioned previously), because they had such a huge memory speed advantage but inferior core, the core is the overclock that will matter the most for them. This is not so true for current gen cards.
 
I agree with Alacritan. Each card will be different, even among the same manufactures cards. The only way to find your cards sweet spot is benchmarking after each small change until you see no gain or have stability issues.
 
Ok, i benched and i benched with diff clocks:

With default setting (400/300) my 3Dmark2001 score was 11035
With 480/340 3Dmark2001 score was 12154
with 450/325 3Dmark2001 score was 11617

So curretnly im running at 470/345 (AtiTool Artifact free for 30min)

what i noticed was that even the slightest increase in memory gave me few extra fps, but +10 or +20 increase in core didnt do much to the fps. And although my GPU goes all the way up to 485, i decided to leave it 470 for now since the fps stay the same with lesser GPU clock. And push ram to its limits. (would start artifacting at 350 ram)

3Dmark2003 on the other hand gave me a slighter lesser/wierder score. I didnt write it down, but the defference between stock and overclocked settings was somewhere around -300, meaning the overclocked card performed poorly than stock. Wierd :eek:
 
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rus said:
3Dmark2003 on the other hand gave me a slighter lesser/wierder score. I didnt write it down, but the defference between stock and overclocked settings was somewhere around -300, meaning the overclocked card performed poorly than stock. Wierd :eek:
that could mean it's overclocked too much and errors are occuring without showing artifacts, but slow down the total performance
 
Dude, it's because 3DMark03 scores vary rather considerably each time you run one. There is even a documented bug where people get wildly high scores with budget cards. Run it once or twice more and I guarantee you'll get a score 200-300 better than stock. It's weird like that.

And like I said, ATi cards generally benefit from higher memory bus clock because they don't have the bandwidth Nvidia cards have. ATi's have great core architecture but traditionally have rather inadequate memory bandwidth. Your core is plenty fast. Your RAM is what's holding you back.

With AtiTool, put your core back to stock speeds, then find the max memory speed. Then raise the core but leave the memory bus at the max overclock. That will give you the best performance.
 
Thanks guys, i will do some more 3Dmark2003 loop tests. Will post later. :)
 
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