that is a significant overclock on the core speed. however, im confused with what you aid there, and then what you said in the next paragraph...did the overclock work or not? because with those numbers, it should have had a noticeable change.

Hard to say, really, whether it made a difference. I think I'll see how Warhead runs without the overclock.

Unfortunately I uninstalled the original Crysis, so I can't test that WITH it.

Hmm... I wonder if there's a "show FPS" setting.

would be easier if you had some kind of benchmarking software. do you know of any, or should i suggest some for you?

Now that you mention it, I've got an outdated version of Futuremark around here somewhere... Must find it...

WTF. It was on the pc already! Stupid Windows Vista just refused to find it when I searched.

.... And Vista refuses to run it, giving a BS excuse about a missing dll file. I'll have to try in XP.

what was already on the pc? the game or the benchmarking software you were talking about?

The futuremark/3Dmark 2006 benchmark software.

Ok, I got some 3dmark results. It seems to get a few more FPS but I'm not sure how much better it really is. I could try clocking it higher, but I can't find a program to test stability... ATI tool is meant to do it, but the bloody thing crashes even WITHOUT overclocking.

Before overclocking, I got:

3DMark Score 9593 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score 4582
HDR/SM3.0 Score 4063
CPU Score 2346
Game Score N/A
GT1 - Return To Proxycon 36.947 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest 39.412 FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley 0.740 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 1.191 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight 41.237 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze 40.014 FPS
Fill Rate - Single-Texturing 3455.196 MTexels/s
Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing 17199.814 MTexels/s
Pixel Shader 336.899 FPS
Vertex Shader - Simple 206.663 MVertices/s
Vertex Shader - Complex 139.102 MVertices/s
Shader Particles (SM3.0) 132.345 FPS
Perlin Noise (SM3.0) 115.477 FPS
8 Triangles 22.218 MTriangles/s
32 Triangles 89.085 MTriangles/s
128 Triangles 254.302 MTriangles/s
512 Triangles 256.606 MTriangles/s
2048 Triangles 251.306 MTriangles/s
32768 Triangles 250.494 MTriangles/s


AFTER overclocking to 620Mhz core, I got:
3DMark Score 10107 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score 4859
HDR/SM3.0 Score 4410
CPU Score 2345
Game Score N/A N/A
GT1 - Return To Proxycon 39.542 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest 41.442 FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley 0.738 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 1.193 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight 44.855 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze 43.343 FPS
Fill Rate - Single-Texturing 3724.880 MTexels/s
Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing 18567.752 MTexels/s
Pixel Shader 365.190 FPS
Vertex Shader - Simple 221.905 MVertices/s
Vertex Shader - Complex 150.439 MVertices/s
Shader Particles (SM3.0) 145.858 FPS
Perlin Noise (SM3.0) 124.840 FPS
8 Triangles 22.156 MTriangles/s
32 Triangles 87.956 MTriangles/s
128 Triangles 273.728 MTriangles/s
512 Triangles 276.980 MTriangles/s
2048 Triangles 271.634 MTriangles/s
32768 Triangles 270.850 MTriangles/s

well thats a good enough improvement. you got more frames per second, even if they were only 3 or 4, and overall, its a good improvement. if your heat is holding out fine, then id say you did a good job.

The heat gets up to about 83C during the artifact scanning in ATI tool, but I think it does that anyway even without overclocking it. That scanning of the spinning cube heats the card up insanely for some reason.

Hmm. Strange. I tried taking the clock higher. I got the Core to 650Mhz with no problems. But I can't use the core at 650Mhz AND the memory at 1000Mhz. It starts freezing up the system during the ATI tool test.

I don't really understand that... Every guide to overclocking I've read says that you're meant to test out the core and the memory independantly, but that doesn't make sense. If I do that, I can get both to insanely high levels with no problem. Then when I put those values together, I get big problems.

Any idea why?

Wait, maybe I was wrong. It freezes up after a while with 640Mhz, no matter what the memory is set to, even though the heat isn't any worse. I think it's something to with the shader clock being too high since it's connected to the core by default. Can change that, but not in ATI tool.

OK...

I set the clock in RivaTuner and TESTED it in ATI tool this time.

Core clock 640Mhz.
Shader clock 1450Mhz.
Memory 1000Mhz.

Oddly, it found no artifacts, didn't get insanely hot, and yet it froze up for a few seconds.

Somehow I think I'll be sticking with my tried and tested overclock.

This message was edited by DG on Jul 09 2009.