All right, it has been written a lot on how to do overclocking with
voltmodding properly, now it's time to tell you what exactly has been done with
this Sapphire Radeon 9600XT, and how fast it runs after all. So, the
graphprocessor has been fed with 1.6V right from the start (two 1.0kΩ
resistors), what allowed to advance right for 641.25MHz (here and forth all
frequency increments are in quarters of the master clock which is 27.00MHz,
i. e. in 6.75MHz quanta). However, almost all memory overclocking which
has been obtained prior to voltmodding vanished somewhere. No matter how fast or
slow the graphprocessor is clocked, the memory suffers greatly. This is a clear
sign of overvoltage, so the RV360's stabiliser has been set for 1.45V
(2.2kΩ upper and 2.7kΩ lower resistor). Memory performance has
recovered to 371.25MHz, and the graphprocessor has been able to reach 614.25MHz.
That's +60.75MHz from 553.50MHz obtained prior to voltmodding. Not bad, but who
wants more? 1.53V (2.0kΩ upper and 2.2kΩ lower resistor) —
634.5MHz, but the memory has started to play tricks again, though not so hard as
with 1.6V before. It seems that this RV360 isn't from the best batch definitely,
and TSOP-II memory packaging isn't the best thing for high clock speeds, but
we've got what we've got. It's time to fight for memory performance with
increased voltage. Setting up Vdd for 2.75V (2.0kΩ lower resistor) and
Vddq for 2.73V (2.2kΩ lower resistor). The memory has become stable at
364.50MHz, but the radiators on the back side of the card have been quite warm
under heavy load. No more memory volts, let's play with the timings.
Unfortunately, even with the timings increased the memory has stuck at
364.50MHz. So, it has been only left to tune them properly for the best
performance and reliability.
|
tCAS |
tRCDrd |
tRCDwr |
tRP |
tRRD |
tR2R |
tWR |
tR2W |
tW2R |
tW2Rsb |
tRAS |
tRFC |
before |
4 |
5 |
5 |
7 |
3 |
2 |
3 |
7 |
2 |
3 |
10 |
17 |
after |
4 |
5 |
4 |
6 |
2 |
2 |
4 |
7 |
2 |
4 |
10 |
18 |
After all, we've got the graphprocessor at 634.50MHz and the memory at
364.50MHz (729.00MHz effective). A good overclock, but not that much to be
really proud of. All right, let's check with 3DMark 2001SE v330 and
3DMark 2005 v1.2.0 how much the card has gained in means of
performance if compared to the non-overclocked one. The card has been plugged
into an ASUS SK8V mainboard (VIA K8T800 based) with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-51
2.2GHz@2.44GHz and two 512Mb Mushkin ECC registered DDR SDRAM sticks at 222MHz
(444MHz effective) in so-called dual-channel mode. Windows XP SP1 with
DirectX 9.0c and ATI Catalyst 5.10 drivers have been installed.
3DMark 2001SE v330
(1024 × 768 × 32bpp)
|
|
Fill Rate |
High Polygon Count |
Nature |
S-texturing |
M-texturing |
1 light |
8 lights |
BF |
16x AF |
16x AF 4x MSAA |
before |
1020 Mtex/s |
1970 Mtex/s |
48.8 Mtr/s |
13.3 Mtr/s |
51.3fps |
35.5fps |
24.1fps |
after |
1280 Mtex/s |
2490 Mtex/s |
61.9 Mtr/s |
16.8 Mtr/s |
64.5fps |
44.7fps |
30.3fps |
3DMark 2005 v1.2.0
(1024 × 768 × 32bpp with TF)
|
|
Return to Proxycon |
Firefly Forest |
Canyon Flight |
Overall Score |
before |
9.4fps |
6.0fps |
9.4fps |
2030 |
after |
11.3fps |
7.2fps |
11.4fps |
2440 |
Well, there is some nice 20% to 25% improvement in performance on average.
Not bad definitely. Although there have been no visual artifacts detected, the
author has followed his regular practice of reducing clock speeds by one or two
quarters of the master clock before putting the card to everyday's use or
selling it away, so 621.00MHz graphprocessor clock and 357.75MHz (715.50MHz
effective) memory clock together with the modified timings have been flashed
into the card's BIOS. Soon after, this master-piece has been dumped to the
author's junior brother for further testing with various gaming crap. No
complaints after a week or so.