Overclocking a 9600XT

[Slick]

My friend thinks that the OverDrive program that comes with the new radeon cards is useless. I am a noob when it comes to overclocking so if someone could give me the basics. This is the stock radeon 9600xt so it has really cheap cooling. I have downloaded Rage3d Tweak, I am just not sure how much to crank this baby up without hurting it.

[Thrax]

Take memory and core up 5 at a time and run a benchmark.

When you see textures with white sparkles, memory is too high.
When you see models that don't look like they should, core is too high.

When you reach that point, back it down by 5MHz, and run again. No sparkles or ****ups? Good. Go play for a while.. Something longer than a benchmark. Do they show up again? No? You're done. Yes? Lower it by five and try again.

[Slick]

I have it running stable with the core at 567 MHz and the Memory at 346.5 MHz. Does this sound, high, low, average? Are you sure the stock cooling can handle this? If I bring the core any higher the game (raven-shield) crashes, and if I bring the memory and higher I get artifacts. I also tested it out with Call of Duty and it seemed to work pretty good.

[Geeky1]

Sounds about right to me. Feel the back of the card directly over the GPU after you've been playing games for a while. How hot is it?

[Slick]

It will be a bitch to rip the whole case out from under the desk and then plug all the wires in again afterwords.