S
Strontium
Wayne,
Thanks for your interest. BTW, it's an awesom feeling to get a 9700 PRO for
the price of a non PRO lol.
Anyway, as to your questions...
At first, do not worry about overclocking. It's something that geeks, like
me, do to try and justify our dollars spent
But, if you must
overclock....get a good board. FIC makes good PCB's. As long as your PCB
is good, you can overclock it till the cows come home. Too bad Asus does
not do ATI. But, I digress.
Now, to answer your questions regarding flashing the card's BIOS. You see,
the whole purpose of overclocking the card is to squeeze as much performance
out of it, as possible. Now, I'm not telling you anything that you do not
know. However, there comes a time when one has to take matters into one's
own hands.... (no pun). I found, with my Asus GF3Ti200 that software
overclocking did not work. It would work fine, if I was logged in as
administrator. That was not the solution that I was looking for. Either
way, through the software, I could overclock it (without rebooting) and see
just what I could get away with. Turned out ot be 250/550. My CPU and
memory were major bottlenecks, so I put it back down to 250/500 and flashed
it to the card's BIOS. I wanted to know that this clock was always the same
speed...hence, the flashing.
I used nvflash. I followed the command to backup the current bios.
Basically, it's reading your card's bios and dumping it to a file on the
floppy. Then, I edited the rom file using Ray's bios editor. Saved it as
another name. For example: original bios that i dumped = xxxxold.rom and
new bios that i just modded saved as xxxxnew.rom
Then, booted with a win98 disk, yet a gain (have to do all of this from
native DOS, with the exception of editing the bios) After that, i flashed
it.
This is where it's REAL important to choose a good vendor. If you get the
cheapest, out there, don't EVEN think about flashing the card. Either way,
trust me. It will blow your socks off. I overclock the card cuz I'm a
miser and want to get more for my 200 bux lol
The reason i flash bios for overclock is the fact that software cannot be
trusted....specially winblows. I prefer to have it over and done with. If
you install the omega drivers , you'll have time to contemplate this. I,
also, prefer using a BIOS flash cuz it's always there. Permanent. And, I
have plenty of floppys laying around...no bigge.
-
Wayne Youngman stood up, at show-n-tell in
[email protected] and said:
Thanks for your interest. BTW, it's an awesom feeling to get a 9700 PRO for
the price of a non PRO lol.
Anyway, as to your questions...
At first, do not worry about overclocking. It's something that geeks, like
me, do to try and justify our dollars spent
But, if you mustoverclock....get a good board. FIC makes good PCB's. As long as your PCB
is good, you can overclock it till the cows come home. Too bad Asus does
not do ATI. But, I digress.
Now, to answer your questions regarding flashing the card's BIOS. You see,
the whole purpose of overclocking the card is to squeeze as much performance
out of it, as possible. Now, I'm not telling you anything that you do not
know. However, there comes a time when one has to take matters into one's
own hands.... (no pun). I found, with my Asus GF3Ti200 that software
overclocking did not work. It would work fine, if I was logged in as
administrator. That was not the solution that I was looking for. Either
way, through the software, I could overclock it (without rebooting) and see
just what I could get away with. Turned out ot be 250/550. My CPU and
memory were major bottlenecks, so I put it back down to 250/500 and flashed
it to the card's BIOS. I wanted to know that this clock was always the same
speed...hence, the flashing.
I used nvflash. I followed the command to backup the current bios.
Basically, it's reading your card's bios and dumping it to a file on the
floppy. Then, I edited the rom file using Ray's bios editor. Saved it as
another name. For example: original bios that i dumped = xxxxold.rom and
new bios that i just modded saved as xxxxnew.rom
Then, booted with a win98 disk, yet a gain (have to do all of this from
native DOS, with the exception of editing the bios) After that, i flashed
it.
This is where it's REAL important to choose a good vendor. If you get the
cheapest, out there, don't EVEN think about flashing the card. Either way,
trust me. It will blow your socks off. I overclock the card cuz I'm a
miser and want to get more for my 200 bux lol
The reason i flash bios for overclock is the fact that software cannot be
trusted....specially winblows. I prefer to have it over and done with. If
you install the omega drivers , you'll have time to contemplate this. I,
also, prefer using a BIOS flash cuz it's always there. Permanent. And, I
have plenty of floppys laying around...no bigge.
-
Wayne Youngman stood up, at show-n-tell in
[email protected] and said:
Strontium said:Can't speak... Still in awe
Spent the past 6hrs finding the overclock threshhold for this card.
Found it. 331/304 (608 DDR). 12MHz shy of a 9700pro, memory-wise.
6MHz over that of a 9700pro core-wise. I'd say... I've, pretty much,
got a 9700 pro hehehe
of me!
15076 3DMarks (2001SE)
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6778751
4977 3DMarks (2003)
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=1053327
Forget the 3DMarks. I use that, mainly, to help me determine my
overclock and other settings. But, I gotta tell ya...the graphics in
3DMark03 blow me away! Anyway, my real test of stability for my
overclcok is Splinter Cell. That game will bust a chop, at the first
sign of a bad overclock. Can you say 'artifact city?'
This card rocks. And, the image quality still has me reeling....
OH! BTW! Those who say that the 9700np's are
locked.............................HUH?
I used ATIFlash to dump a copy of my running BIOS. BiosEdit to
adjust settings (this, all after testing through software to
determine my max overclock...ALWAYS keep a copy of your original
BIOS on
diskette!!!!). I found RadeEdit to be lacking, in many ways. Just
be forewarned: If you use BiosEdit, the first frequency setting is
memory, not core. I flashed my card and came to find my memory was
hugely overclocked! Strange that he/she would put the memory clock
first in that row. Hehe.
Hi, lol I nearly overlooked this thread. Sounds like its going
well.. Can you explain the *upgrade* process a little more. I'm not
quite sure how you determined the overclock ceiling of your new card
using software only?. If you could do it in software why the need
for BIOS flash?. I have almost got the money together to buy a 9700
but this BIOS flash thing makes me feel awkward. . . .I flashed
plenty of things before (mobo, modem, CD-Burner) but I never had to
edit anything in HEX?.
Thanks allot for sharing your findings with us. . .
Wayne ][
