Risky Using ATITool?

[Monkfish]

Having used ATITool on my X1900XT card I've discovered that performance is around 4% higher than the same clock settings under the Catalyst Overdrive interface. This demonstrates that ATITool is not using the same settings as ATI themselves. As part of the OC process is now voltage adjustment this makes me extremely nervous.

An example of ATITool's difference comes when testing F.E.A.R. When setting the X1900XT clock to that of an X1900XTX, FEAR runs perfectly well, but reports a much lower benchmark result than at XT clocking. Clocking the card further eventually reaches a point where FEAR fails to run (despite every other application, including ATITool itself, demonstrating total stability at this setting). The same thing does not occur under Catalyst overclocking.

Is the fact that ATITool has been stuck at its current beta for over a year an indication that the TechPowerUP guys realise that they haven't the whole picture when it comes to X1x00 overclocking?

Is ATI slackening the latency timings at higher clocks, so that reviewers can report a greater OC prowess from ATI cards? Is this the reason why they continue to keep the precise nature of OC settings close to their chest?

The complex nature of X1x00 overclocking makes me nervous to use any 3rd party utility untill the community FULLY understands the process.

I would use ATITool as it is probably the best X1x00 OC utility currently available, but this uncertainty an inconsistency in results makes me as nervous as hell to use it.

What the community needs is a clear statement on the state of X1x00 know-how: both from 3rd party writers and preferably ATI themselves.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Overclocking isn't meant to be "save". With a hand few of exceptions the comunity seems to be very happy with ATITool, if all those happy users aren't enough ensurance for you I suggest you run your X1900XT at stock speed.

As for "us TechPowerUP guys", W1zzard is the programmer, most of us know as much as you do about how it works. None of us are nervous though.

However, if there really is a noticable performance difference when overclocked with a different tool it would be interesting to know why that is. If known somebody will reply and tell us

 

[Monkfish]

This thread wasn't intended to be a rant against ATITool. As I said, I think it's the best tool currently available for X1000 cards. But, overclocking is generally safe provided sufficient cooling and all you're doing is increasing the clocks. Increasing the voltage is a different matter entirely. I wasn't too impressed when the ability to increase the voltage was introduced under software control by both NVIDIA & ATI. A software bug, glitch or virus that targets the catalyst drivers or any 3rd party app could potentially destroy a lot of cards.

I was hoping that ATITool would be out of Beta by now — giving a clear signal that W1zzard was confident with the whole process.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

Is the fact that ATITool has been stuck at its current beta for over a year an indication that the TechPowerUP guys realise that they haven't the whole picture when it comes to X1x00 overclocking?


I was hoping that ATITool would be out of Beta by now — giving a clear signal that W1zzard was confident with the whole process.

A lot of things have changed with the x1900 series cards, and w1zzard gets little to NO help from Ati with this.

If you wanna see easier progress, get Ati to send white papers to W1zz

 

[Monkfish]

Yes I know. I guess the reason why ATI/NVIDIA may be keeping such info secret is exactly because of the risk of virus/malware tampering. However, I might put all of this to both companies and see what they have to say about it.

I also think it's rather mean spirited of the enthusiast community not to be more sharing with the knowledge gleaned. It seems as though all the 3rd party coders wish to keep their knowledge to themselves. What happened to the open-source spirit of cooperation?

As overclocking these modern cards has become a complicated business, we should be pulling our knowledge base and getting the whole subject pinned.

Maybe I've just taken 3rd party apps for granted in the past. There's no doubt that ATITool is a more advanced utility than anything we've seen before, and W1zzard should be congratulated. It is actually a utility I'd be prepared to pay a small amount for, if I could be 100% confident in what it was doing in comparison to the Catalyst drivers — or come to that, understand 100% what the Catalyst drivers are doing.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

Yes I know. I guess the reason why ATI/NVIDIA may be keeping such info secret is exactly because of the risk of virus/malware tampering. However, I might put all of this to both companies and see what they have to say about it.

I also think it's rather mean spirited of the enthusiast community not to be more sharing with the knowledge gleaned. It seems as though all the 3rd party coders wish to keep their knowledge to themselves. What happened to the open-source spirit of cooperation?

As overclocking these modern cards has become a complicated business, we should be pulling our knowledge base and getting the whole subject pinned.

Maybe I've just taken 3rd party apps for granted in the past. There's no doubt that ATITool is a more advanced utility than anything we've seen before, and W1zzard should be congratulated. It is actually a utility I'd be prepared to pay a small amount for, if I could be 100% confident in what it was doing in comparison to the Catalyst drivers — or come to that, understand 100% what the Catalyst drivers are doing.

W1zzards magic cannot be replicated

While yes, this is a very advanced program, I don't think opensourcing it, much like drivers, would help much, if at all. Its not so much time to code things, like firefox would have.. having to code in support for MANY things..

Atitool and the like are very simply designed, but I think 99% of the time involved is trial and error getting things to work.

Besides, how many people know the level of code w1zz uses? Not too many around, sadly