Radeon 9500 Pro overclocking safe ?

[antipop]

hey people,

im very new to overclocking. i bought my pc from a friend and i try to get the most out of it at the moment.

so the card is: Excalibur Radeon 9500 Pro + "standart" fan
i just dont want the card to crash due to my little experiments. am i on the safe side with atitools, if i use it properly ?

 

[peach1971]

Are your stock speeds 275Mhz (GPU) / 270Mhz (MEM)?

I´ve had a 9500 non-pro (Sapphire) unlocked to 8 Pipes and could run it at 300/300 plus something.
It tended to freeze with the stock cooler, so I built in a case cooler, giving cool air right to the position of the card.

Did not want to spend too much on an extra VGA cooler for that card.

And yeah, you´re on the safe side with ATi Tool.
When it overclocks too much without seeing artefacts (that was my case), it can freeze though.
Keep the cooling in mind.

 

[Jimmy 2004]

i just dont want the card to crash due to my little experiments. am i on the safe side with atitools, if i use it properly ?

If you use it properly then the risk of damaging the card is very low, you should be perfectly safe to do it. ATITool will detect artifacts as soon as the card starts getting too hot/ goes to far, and will start lowering the clocks if you tell it to find max.

 

[antipop]

Are your stock speeds 275Mhz (GPU) / 270Mhz (MEM)?

if i run atitool, the defaults are: 276.75 (Core) and 270 (mem)

max core: i didnt wait for the finish, but after 40 minutes or so its like 345.
i see some yellow or white little pixels in the animation after that time, is this normal ?

didnt check max mem yet.

and i dont have a clue what artifacts are

should i check out my max values, and use these only games then ?

btw: the reason how i came to overclocking: the visualization plugin from winamp has a little too low fps @ 800x600, strange imo, since i play nfs most wanted in this resolution without any problems..

 

[Jimmy 2004]

Artifacts are those little yellow/ white pixels you're seeing! An artifact can actually be any form of graphical anomaly. Try setting your Core to 330MHz if the artifacts start at 345MHz, if they start before then set the core to 10MHz less than what it is when they start. ATITool probably started lowering the speed when that happened.