Requesting some help overclocking my vid card

[Jo25]

Hello out there!

I have recently purchased a Gigabyte K8T800Pro Board, 2 x 512Mb RAM on dual channel, AMD 3000+ and a 256Mb Saphire Radeon 9550 Graphics.

I have downloaded the latest Catalyst drivers and ATItool 0.24.

My Problem is:

1. I want to overclock my Graphics card but am unsure whether or not I should download the 9600 Bios and if I do, should it be the powercolor 9600 256 Pro BIOS or the Saphire 9600 256 non pro one?

And when I use the ATItool should I crank the core and the memory to what I want and then do a scan for artifacts or do I sit there for 3 hours and find the max mem and core?

I feel this card is just cr@p. I had expected it to run games a lot better than it does. For example in games like NFS Most Wanted the game runs like a dogs breakfast at 800 X 600.

Doom 3 it runs at this res ok on high but with need for speed it sucks as with other games.

PC has just been rebuilt and spring cleaned so to speak (defrag) etc and want to pump this peice of cr@p up a bit.

p.s. Does anyone now of a decent cpu overclocking program as I have been using the gigabyte Easytune software?

Thanks all for your time.

[Thermopylae_480]

Do you have a 9600 Pro? Why do you want to switch BIOS'? If you have a 9600 non-pro you won't get any extra pipelines or performance by flashing the BIOS to Pro. If you want to overclock your card just use ATITool. Click ont he settings button and go to Misc under the dropdown menu. Then click on the checked box to unlock overclocking for the 9600. If you still can't overclock download the softmoded drivers (http://www.techpowerup.com/softmod/downloads.php).

As for overclocking you CPU your pretty much stuck using the Gigabyte Easytune software, if you want to overclock from windows, that will probably be your best option. Really the best, and most stable way, to OC your CPU and memory is from BIOS though.

[Jo25]

Sorry I edited my post. The card is a 9550 Saphire Radeon 256Mb.

I looked at the post done by W1zzard about the 9550

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=463&highlight=radeaon+9550

Apparantly I can get better output if I flash the BIOS to a 9600. but which one? I have the samsung chips and the tc50.

I have the BIOS updates but where now? I don't have a floppy drive and tried to follow directions on how to create a bootable USB stick but couldn't get to the files needed to create it on from the aboove link.

Thanks for your help.

[Dippyskoodlez]

I feel this card is just cr@p. I had expected it to run games a lot better than it does. For example in games like NFS Most Wanted the game runs like a dogs breakfast at 800 X 600.

Doom 3 it runs at this res ok on high but with need for speed it sucks as with other games..

With my experience, here are the results you will probably see: My gf4 handles NFS:MW at 800x600 like a dog too. The engine is buggy and ea needs a patch pretty bad, your not alone. 800x600 is about what you'll get with that game, because the engine is designed for higher end cards in mind.

As for doom 3, 800x600 to 1024x768 on med/high qual should be about playable.

Sounds about normal. :)

[Thermopylae_480]

Well once you have figured out what type of core and memory you have, and that your card meets the requirements to flash, you can just pick a BIOS. You can get one here (http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/). Usually BIOS' by Sapphire, ATI are the best. If you can't find one of those, MSI, ASUS, HIS, Gigabyte, and Powercolor are usually decent. You can make a bootable CD (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+make+a+bootable+cd) that gets you into DOS, and have your BIOS' and ATIFlash on your hardrive if you want. You may want to use RaBit (http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/9) to clock down the new BIOS until you are sure your card will be stable at the 9600 speeds.

-Godspeed

[Jo25]

It's a pain in the you know what without a bloody floppy atm. Can I not just boot to dos using F8 at startup and flash the rom there?

Sorry for all the dramas.

[Thermopylae_480]

I don't think so? Does F8 take you to DOS on your comp? If you have Nero 6 It has a boot disk creator that looks pretty simple, older versions may have it too. Usually you need some sort of boot disk to do any BIOS flashing. You could always just go scrounge up a floppy somewhere. I got one for an old computer and spraypainted the front black, looks pretty good and is pretty handy to.

[Slayerstaps]

http://forums.techpowerup.com/announcement.php?f=14

Pls take notice of this for future threads

thread title changed

[Jo25]

Thanks Slayerstaps. I realised what I did after I created the post but couldn't change the thread title. Ta.