Over clocking questoins, x800 GTO^2 (Sapphire)

[Slathe]

I resently got my brand new Sapphire x800 GTO^2 and over clocked it to 542.24 core and 621 mem and then flashed the BIOS to unlock the extra 4 piplines. What I would like to know first of all is how do I ATIT tool to over clock my card automatickly at system start up? Second, is my card modable so that it balieves it's a x850 XT PE?

Also, after I preformed the mod my system became rather unstable. Every thing ran slower and I could lonch NO games OR scan for artafacts, not evin Half Life 1. After unistalling its "updated" drivers that windows atomaticly installed and catalisk and reinstald catalisk every thing worked pefictly. Smooth as butter. The intresting thing is that when i serched for my max core to see if it was still good to go at the high clock, the core climed clear up to 553.53, generating no errors. It kept climbing up to about 560 MHz with befour my system randomly restarted; I balieve this instability is do to 300 watt power saply pushing 4 IDE drives (2 hard drives and 2 dvd berners). The card is compleatly stock, havnt done anything to it other then flasht he bios. Is it safe to continue pushing the card to thies newly achivable core clocks with my system? Also the memory has clocked up to 660 MHz with no artifacts jenerated but then my system spontaniusly restarted at 663 MHz.

 

[trog100]

my saphire gto2 maxes out at about 560 core and 626 memory.. for total stability i run it at 540 core and 600 memory for real life gaming.. and thats with artic vga extra cooling not the stock cooler..

if u want to test your clock speeds for stabilty.. 3dmark2005 is as good as anything.. just cos it runs that atitool furry dice thing for while means bugger all..

if your system does wierd things u have overclocked too far.. in short it should run the same at your new higher speeds as it does at the default ones..

as for going to full speed at windows load up... there is no point whatsoever in doing this.. u dont need full speed in 2d windows so why bother..

use the atitool 3d detect option to crank the card up as and when its needed.. benchmarking or gaming.. atitool dosnt detect its own furry dice thing as 3d so for playing with that u will have to load a manual profile.. set a speed select save give it a name then u can use it.. i have a few saved.. default.. low.. mid.. high.. high-mem..

your power supply is bit marginal.. but a good genuine 300 watt one with enough voltage on the 12 volt rail should do the job.. it is on the edge thow.. but i dont think its the cause of your instaibilty.. course if u start writeing data to both HDs and buring a couple of CDs all at the same tiime whilst running these tests it might bomb out.. he he he

the real x850 xt pe.. was the cream of the crop.. it came overclocked out of the box so to speak.. the pe was an xt chip that was picked to be able to run at the faster pe core speeds reliably..

this means a 10% safety marigin from a manufacturers point of view.. this means on average a core speed of 540 could be tweaked up to say near 600 with a modicum of luck.. without this safety margin they would get too many returns and bad pr..

my gto2 max speed is too close to the pe out of the box 540 for it to be safely sold as one.. it dsont have the safety margin.. still it does run happy at xt pe speeds.. dont expect much more thow without volt mods and better cooling..

i would call these chips "failed" XT PE ones.. ones that didnt quite make the 10% safety margin.. it also a good explanation for so many of em existing.. a real xt pe chip (card) might well clock up to 590 useing that safety margin.. not many gto2 ones will thow..

trog

 

[Slathe]

At my 542.45 core and 621 mem it runs just as stable as when it came right out of the box... Stock cooling and all. My system only starts to be come unstable at 555+ and the memory over clock abiltiy is like 660 befour the sistem starts getting pissy. When playing games i have a CRAP load of HDD activity for paging because I only have a 512 ddr2 chip for ram... I havn't used ATIT tools befour, it's profile sistem confuses me. I saved a fiew profiles but I cant seam to get its global hot keyes to work. It says press and hold the keys you want to assign and then click update, but it dusnt work... Also this is my first over clock atempt...

Would getting a better power saply help increas stability if when I start pushing it higher? I never have artifacts or screan black outs, the system just randomly reboots if I set it a tinsy bit to high. Never seen the tempritures rise over 68 C...

 

[trog100]

the bottom line here is u need to upgrade the rest of your system before u are gonna get any "real" benefits at all out of overclocking that grfx card to the extreme.. sorry dude..

trog