Page 6 - Overclocking

Overclocking
Before we dive into an extensive series of tests, we need to discuss overclocking. With most videocards, we can do some easy tricks to boost the overall performance a little. It's called overclocking the videocard, and by increasing the frequency of the videocards memory and graphics core we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less then a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5-10% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card would run at 300 MHz then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 330 MHz.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when memory starts to show white dots 'snow' you should go down 10 MHz and leave it at that. The core can be somewhat different. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. I recommend that you back down at least 15 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well.

All in all .. do it at your own risk. Overclocking your card too fast or constantly to its limit might damage your card, and it's not covered by your warranty.

You will benefit from overclocking the most with a product that is limited or you may called it 'tuned down'. We know that this graphics core is often limited by tact frequency or bandwidth limitation, therefore by increasing the memory and core frequency we should be able to witness some higher performance results. A simple trick to get some more bang for your bucks.

Overclocking wise the videocard did quite well, woohoo .. it's been a while that I've seen an unlocked ATI Radeon product. Remember, we don't do just one quick test-run to see how far it clocks. No, the tweak is enabled all the way and must return it's results without _any_ crashing or graphics anomalies in _all_ benchmarks properly to be called stable.

Now we have two options to overclock. OverDrive and of course the hard way, doing it yourself with the help of a third party overclocking tool, we'll do just that. With RivaTuner we got the card up-to 550 MHZ on the core. Memory was the same story, again we where able to run it beyond default 9600XT performance. We got it up-to 2x350 stable, at 700 MHz.

All tests were made in 32 bit colors in resolutions ranging from 800x600 pixels up-to the Godfather of all gaming resolutions, the 1600x1200 several performance/quality settings.