Overclocking a Sapphire 9500 PRO

  • Thread starter Thread starter ernie samulaitis
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ernie samulaitis

Im currently using that rage3d overclocker under windows xp pro, this is
my current specs.

- updated the bios to make it into a 9700 pro
- overclocked core to 330 and memory to 330 <-- can i go higher?

- i am running agp 4x, with a p4 1.7 256 ddr266

on 3dmark2001 i am getting almost 9000, is that good or bad? 533mhz fsb
aswell. can i make this card go faster?


regards
 
ernie samulaitis said:
Im currently using that rage3d overclocker under windows xp pro, this is
my current specs.

- updated the bios to make it into a 9700 pro
- overclocked core to 330 and memory to 330 <-- can i go higher?
Click to expand...

Depends on the speed of your video card memory, but that is around the limit
usually. However, I normally run the core on my 9500pro faster...

3.0ns ram can run around 330, sometimes a little faster. It depends on the
brand ( Infineon, Samsung, Hynix, etc... ).
- i am running agp 4x, with a p4 1.7 256 ddr266
Click to expand...

The speed of your CPU is more of a limiting factor than you might imagine,
and you ram speed as well. I mean, for example, what good is a 533mhz fsb
if you ram only goes 133mhz for 266 double data rate throughput. AGP 4x
isn't as big a bottleneck, but it can have some effect ( a lot of testing
has determined that most games don't utilize AGP 8x, but newer DirectX9 ones
might - it is mostly a question of the amount of textures utilized ).
on 3dmark2001 i am getting almost 9000, is that good or bad? 533mhz fsb
aswell. can i make this card go faster?
Click to expand...

Generally speaking, yes...

You can eliminate the CPU/RAM bottleneck by upgrading, of course that can
get expensive. For a less costly speed increase try upping the clock on the
core, but as I said you may not get any more out of your video ram. Aside
from trial and error to find you ram limits, you would have to physically
examine the chips themselves to determine the make and model - even if the
operating speed is printed on the chips it alone is not always the whole
story.
 
yeah thanks for the information there, i just have one more thing in the
rage3d overclocker, i have my mem and core set to 330, if i set them both
up any little higher my screen starts to get lines on it. so im trying to
find out, can i bump the core up alot more than the memory, what is
causing these lines when im only clocking the frequency like 20+ mhz per
core and ram, any idea?

regards,
 
I might have something to stretch things a little further, but I have
never tested it and don't regularlly overclock anything in my system.
Any problems are your own.

Many of the overclocking sites recommend upping the AGP voltage by
manually raising the BIOS value known as AGP Driving Value or AGP
Driving Strength. It's an old idea that's been around since the
release and overclocking of the GeForce 3.

Some swear by it and even say it improves stability in certain
systems. Others say it's useless and any increase of the AGP Driving
Value is a cause for alarm. Warning---- set too high even for a few
seconds, this setting CAN fry your motherboard and/or your expensive
graphics card.

The default for this BIOS setting is normally Auto which defaults to a
value of DA. (The setting is always in hexadecimal regardless of your
motherboard or CPU.) The setting I normally read about is to manually
set it to EA and no higher!

The theory behind this is that the newer cards are very power hungry.
(If you've bought one of the newer cards and found out that once
installed your system won't Post because the wattage is too low, then
you've found this out already.) A slight increase in this setting is
SUPPOSED to not hurt things but will raise heat slightly.

Again, I've never tested this so if anything blows up, I was never
here. :)


Leslie
 
ernie samulaitis said:
yeah thanks for the information there, i just have one more thing in the
rage3d overclocker, i have my mem and core set to 330, if i set them both
up any little higher my screen starts to get lines on it. so im trying to
find out, can i bump the core up alot more than the memory, what is
causing these lines when im only clocking the frequency like 20+ mhz per
core and ram, any idea?
Click to expand...

Depending on the card the GPU voltage may be too low to clock the core
higher. You may be able to find a bios that is modded for higher core
voltage, or you would have to do a vmod of some type. I have had the same
problem on a 9500np, that went away when I upgraded the bios to 9700pro.
However, 9700pro bios won't work on a 9500pro ( as far as I know ) and I
don't know if there is already one that includes the 9700pro level core
voltages. Another vendors 9500pro bios might have these tweaks, you might
see how other makers 9500pros overclock and go from there.
 
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