Attn: ATI Owners

[GT98]

Well since my system with my Parhelia is down for the next couple days..I've been using my Shuttle SS51G box alot lately and I was wondering what you guys like using for an OC utilitly for your ATI cards. I've used Powerstrip and Rage3d overclocker and didnt care for them that much...so I need some other suggestions

[Helevitia]

That pretty much sums up the two I've used. Though I hate powerstrip and I have read a few times that the OC tools in powerstrip have ruined some peoples 9700's.

Dave

[Indiana]

For the older Radeon cards I think the best oc utility is the "Radeon clocking Utility" that comes with the newer Plutonium drivers. It's lean and does exactly what it should do: adjust the clocks on your Radeon card - and nothing else, it does not mess with your registry or other setup in any way.

Unfortunately it does not work with the 9000/9700 boards and I don't know where to get it as a seperate package.

[rubank]

GT, I don´t know what you have against Rage3D Tweak, I think it´s the best around.

Ati have their own o/c utility, Ati WinClk, but as far as I can tell your settings will disappear upon reboot.

One smart thing with Rage3D is that you can easily put shortcuts in your taskbar with various clockings, which is fine if you don´t want to be overclocked all the time.
Just one click and you get the speed you want, no questions asked.

rubank

[K6-III]

You can use Ragedit and have the bios store the OC settings for ya. You can test stability with Rage3d Tweak or Powerstrip prior to flashing...

[PeTe]

If you are using a R8500-card, i might suggest that when you have found out the your cards limits, just edit the Radeon BIOS to use exactly that setting by default.

No hassles of third party progs and the setting is ALLWAYS there.

There is a prog that lets you modify the bios, cant remember what it was called, got it on my machine.

PeTe

[WyWyWyWy]

Sorry for my ignorance, I am not an ATI user.

What is that Plutonium driver? It is not official is it?

[rubank]

WyWyWyWy don´t you have a look <a href="http://www.omegacorner.com/ati.htm" target="_blank">here</a>

[Gurm]

Erm, or look at Driver Heaven, which is the new official home of the Omega/Plutonium drivers.

Basically Cyborg (the current author, he has inherited the task from Omega who inherited it from Lightspeed) takes the best files from half a dozen versions of the ATI drivers, tweaks the installer, tweaks the .inf files, tweaks the registry settings, and repackages them.

The latest O/P's, when they are current (like now), are usually infinitely superior to ATI's own drivers. The problem is that Cyborg is, despite his name, only human after all - and when ATI goes on a driver-releasing spree (in the past 30 days they've gone through a half-dozen official and unofficial revisions) he can't keep up.

- Gurm

[Ali]

When I was using a Redeon 7200LE I tried the Radedit program, adn it was a pit of a pain.

It kept on doing things that I didnt want, like changing the vcache settings for my hard drives, setting my computer type to 'network server' and other things like that that it shouldnt have touched with out asking me.

I found it very Microsoftish in that respect.

I dont know what its like now, but thats what I remember about it.

Ali

[Indiana]

Ali, you seem to confuse RadEdit with the Rage3D Tweaker.
The first is a very small, very simple tool to load BIOS-files of Radeon8500/7500 cards, modify them (e.g. TVOut standard, clockrates, DOS font) and then safe them as a new file. It does NOT interfere with your Windowssetting, not even with the BIOS of you gfx-card - you need a seperate tool to actually flash the modified BIOS.

Rage3D tweak is a tweaker for Radeon specific Registry settings and can do all nasty things up to fully ruining a Windows install which sounds like what you're describing...

[rubank]

Originally posted by Indiana
...
Rage3D tweak is a tweaker for Radeon specific Registry settings and can do all nasty things up to fully ruining a Windows install which sounds like what you're describing...

Not really, you can also change some Windows registry settings and this is possibly the way you can ruin the win install.

I don´t think you can wreck a win install by changing Ati specific settings; you can always safeboot and restore your install.

By restricting myself to changing Ati settings (in Rage3DTweak) I haven´t experienced any problems that couldn´t be easily undone.

Furthermore, changeing clockings through BIOS also has a downside. You might get a new game or app that put more strain on your card than the ones you tried pre-change, that can prove to be too much for your clockings.

This happened to me with the old G200.

You can reflash of course but, as many know, BIOS flashing isn´t always riskfree.

rubank

[Ali]

Originally posted by Indiana
Ali, you seem to confuse RadEdit with the Rage3D Tweaker.

You are 100% correct. IT was the one from Rage3d.

AS an asside, just picked up my 9700Pro today at lunchtime, popped home to play with it (for a whole half hour).

It gets Bloody hot! I couldnt hold my finger to the back of it.

IT locks up in 3Dmark2001. Now I dont realy care about how many marks I get or whatever, but Ive never seen the nature scene, and I was curious.

My UT2003 scores didnt go up much. I only had time for one run through it, and I picked 640X480 as thats what I tested my G400 at.

With the G400 I was getting something like 60/27fps for flyby/botmatch. With the 9700 Im getting something like 120/38fps.

Remember this is a half hour play, and that included ghosting my hard drive, installing DX8.1b, installing the drivers (and control panel, which is seperate for some reason), locking up and rebooting half way through 3dmark, then running UT2003 demo benchmark.

Im also CPU bound, as I 'only' have a TBird 1.4GHz

the display seems quite a bit darker than what Im use to also. The VGA output on my dfp is funny, with the text all 'cartoonish'. Its fine once into windows though. I was using the D-sub rather than the DVI because of time constraints (have to find the cable tonight).

I might start a thread tomorrow if I get time.

Ali

[isochar]

I just threw a 9700pro in my machine today too.