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OCing my radeon 9000

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ArTiFaX

Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2004
Hey guys, I have never OCed a video card before but I am thinking I want to try to OC my radeon 9000 64mb ddr. What exactly do I have to do? I want some practice on a ****ty card for when I go to OC a better one in the future :p Any help would be greatly appreciated guys. Thanx again.
 
To oc radeon cards, you can do it in a few ways. I usually use the overclocker integrated in rage tweak. that way your oc is automatic and stuff. but its good to use ati tool to find the limit of your card first.
Ill warn you, the r9000 doesnt return very good results. nothing like the 8500. my 8500le went to 333 mhz on good air cooling where this 9000 pro 128 mb i have now will hit 285 then start being crappy. but, in the software i spoke of, you can raise the speeds of memory and gpu to find whats stable. ati tool will do it for you, scanning for artifacts along the way so its probably best. said my 9000 would do 316 but it wont. its unstable at that speed and gives me purple triangles in ffxi.
ragetweak can be downloaded from www.rage3d.com and do a search on these forums to find ati tool.
you will want to raise your agp voltage to like 1.8 to get a decent oc out of these. i dont know if its voltage limiting these cards, but keep in mind, the r9000 is a neutered 8500.
 
You'll probably want to get a better heatsink/fan combo. I like the IceBerg4 & the Crystal Orb personally. The Crystal Orb fits all cards but the IceBerg4 sometimes has to be modified to work.
 
mine isn't the radeon 9000 pro, its just the normal version. It took my quite a while to find anythign about it on the net to be honest. It can do 1024x780 with 80-90fps in call of duty. I know this isn't amazing, but my friend didn't believe me when i told him this, i had to take a screenshot lol
 
ok guys, I just downloaded both of those programs and i'm not sure what exactly to do, could someone enlighten me? BTW I have a side panel 80mm fan blowing directly at my agp slot so that should help a great deal. thanx in advance
 
ArTiFaX said:
mine isn't the radeon 9000 pro, its just the normal version. It took my quite a while to find anythign about it on the net to be honest. It can do 1024x780 with 80-90fps in call of duty. I know this isn't amazing, but my friend didn't believe me when i told him this, i had to take a screenshot lol

Can we see the screen shot. Been awhile since i played call of duty, but i don't think my 9700pro could hit those fps at that res. Yet i like the eye candy turned all the way up too. :attn:
 
meh. eye candy in most games like that is negligable since the game plays so fast. unless you are standing there, staring at the walls or something. which you cant do, because people are shooting **** at you XD.
at low detail, im sure it could run those fps but anywy... to the point.
Ati tool is pretty much automatic. click the find maxcore/find maxmem buttons to find the fastest speeds those two items will reach, then, you can set those in rage 3d tweak. I dont use rage 3d for the oc tools, mostly for the hidden stuff that ati doesnt turn on in the drivers. mainly, alphablending, stretch bits *enables hardware transform in the os gui* and some of the higher level caching stuffs.

you can set the clocks in rage 3d though. which integrates into the ati driver tab effortlessly so its convenient. no additional software to load at startup. ati tool will literally find the max though. so you will want to set it a few mhz below ati tools max findings for stable use. mine detected 316 as the max, but crashed at 316.6. so 300 is as high as i go.

Cooling is of course a consideration, but it only helps so much on these ppga gpu cores that have a lot of plastic with a sunk metal slug. you will get some gains from better cooling but... i wouldnt get a orb or iceberg. i would find yourself a cheap amd stock heatsink and find a way to mount it. thermal epoxy works pretty well and it will cool welll. the only problem with this is the older radeon cards had the core lower on the card, causing most aftermarket gpu cooling to simply not fit because they would interfere with the agp slot.
my 9000 users a aftermarket copper gpu cooler with leds *basicly an iceberg 4 under a different name* that claims to be compatible with radeon 9xxx series cards.. sure, it mounts, but getting it into the agp slot is a challenge.

anyway. if you have some tools and knowllege in using them. you can mod cooling very cheaply. amd stock sinks are a dim a dozen and will out perform any aftermarket cooling with good fans and arrangement.
Feel free to play with stuff man. its fun to do and you can often come out with some pretty crazy ****nit
 
Ok thanx for all the help, i'm gonna find my max clock rate and post back, oh and about those screenshots, well i'll tell you now that i have no way to prove what my resolution is set to, so you will just have to take my word for it, but i would show you the screenshot if i knew how to post it in here LOL sorry i just started getting into computers about 6 months ago, so as you can see, i still have lots to learn. If you would like to explain how to get a screenshot onto here, i would be more then happy to show you guys. thanx again
 
ok i found out that my max core is 316, so how would i go about overclocking it?
 
Ok, you found your max core is 316, but you don't keep it at 316? I don't understand?
 
Well i was told, that i am suppose to go under what my max is. I'm not sure how to do this tho...oh and for my max memory, when running the test, the numbers stop at 191 everyt time, but the test keeps goin without any errors, is this normal?
 
with ati tool it shows that my max core is about 465 on my 9800se but it shows artifacts at that speed so i clocked it to 462 and it runs like that stable so yes i would clock your core about 5 to 10 mhz lower then ati tools max
 
ok thanx alot, is there a reason my max memory is only 6 clocks higher then deafault? I don't understand...is it just bad memory, or is this normal?
 
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