9800 pro and ati tool

entropy

I started using ATI Tool to overclock my video card, but why does it seem like i can only get certain numbers for the core? if i set it to X, it'll always reduce it by a little bit for some strange reason. why is this happening?

\\EDIT: a few other questions i thought about. i've heard that vpu recover and agp fast write should be turned off ... true? also, in BIOS, what should my "agp aperture" size be set to? the amount of memory on the card?

Leonardo

I guess it's intuitive, and thinks you're too cheap - trying to get sumpin for nuttin!




(Sorry, I don't have a clue.)

entropy

lol overclocking IS for people who are cheap! we can't buy the best but we'll kill medium parts to try to get the best! lol

Medlock

I think it's a bios thing... The clock speeds of the core and memory on the card are set in the card's bios to go up or down in increments of some number, but they're not whole numbers. That's why you always have a speed of xxx.25 or xxx.75 but never quite a whole number. (xxx.00)

Some people say you should turn off fast writes 'cause it only causes more problems that it's worth. I've never seen my computer freeze or slow down because of fast writes, but I just keep it off as I see no difference in performance with it on or off.

As for VPU Recover, it's only done good things for me. It's kept my computer from freezing on me a number of times. I recommend you turn it on of course, but many people say that it slows down your computer and causes more errors than it fixes. Again, I've never seen anything to support that, on my computer at least. Especially before I knew my card would refuse to operate correctly in agp 8x mode. Running it at 8x caused so many infinite loop errors, and vpu recover managed to fix some of these errors before I was forced to reboot the computer.

I read something about the agp aperture size a while ago, but I can't remember what it was. It made me decide to set mine to 64mb, but I've never seen any difference between that or any of the other settings. That one's up to you to figure out.

entropy

if i kill the VPU recover and/or agp fast write, will it give me some overclocking head room or not at all? and what about overvolting the agp ... ? i've heard both that it helps and does nothing but decreases card lifetime. this is frustrating because right now i can maybe get an extra 7 mhz on my core while a lot of people are peeking at 400 (congrats on 6k by the way thegr81!)

Leonardo

I read something about the agp aperture size a while ago, but I can't remember what it was. It made me decide to set mine to 64mb, but I've never seen any difference between that or any of the other settings. That one's up to you to figure out.

I used to experiment with that - never saw a difference.

if i kill the VPU recover and/or agp fast write

VPU - I've heard a lot of opinions, but no definitive answers based on testing.

Medlock

I don't see how turning off vpu recover or fast writes would help you overclock it, but I've never experimented with that. That too, is up to you.

If you're looking to up the voltage to your core/memory, I'm afraid the card regulates that, so the only way to do it is with physical mods done to the card. requires some soldering I think. Lemme go find some linkage... Here we go.

Read through this forum a bit and you can see what these people did to their cards. If it's all done successfully you can hit some pretty insane speeds. Of course you need some pretty good cooling for your card, and there is always the risk that your card may go b00m!