9700 Pro overclock question

[olefarte]

My 9700 Pro is at stock settings, core and memory at 325 and 310/620. My question is, can I overclock with stock cooling and by how much. Also by whatever amount I can, will it be worth the effort in playing games. I'm not having any problems now, but would just like to play around with it a bit.

Another question, I know you guys will love this. My Gateway, (yeah I know, don't say it) has a 250 watt power supply. I can hear all the groans, but everything runs just great. My question here is, and I know this will be dumb, but, if I buy a larger power supply, will it fit, exactly replace the old one. In other words, are they all the same size, and if not how hard would it be to replace.

Last question. I'm using Intel Active Monitoring, and it has Processor Zone, which I assume is the Pentium chip. It also has System Zone 1. Does anyone have any idea what System Zone 1 is? Is that the motherboard? That's the only two temperature readings I have. I've used MBM and I like this better and it seems to me does the same thing.

Computer specs in profile.

 

[Nic]

Here's an interesting link that answers your first question in detail ...

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO Extreme Overclocking Experience

In case you want to skip straight to the conclusion, here it is ...

Conclusion

So, in spite of all our apprehensions, the extreme overclocking of ATI RADEON 9700 PRO is a rewarding thing.

With proper cooling and increased chip and memory voltages, we managed to raise the graphics core and memory clock-rates by 38.5% and 29%, respectively. The maximum frequencies the graphics card would work at were 450MHz for the core and 800MHz (400MHz DDR) for the memory. That's definitely a record-breaking performance!

Judging by the results obtained in Unreal Tournament, the performance growth we got during overclocking reached 30-35%. In other words, it appeared proportional to the increase of the chip and memory frequencies.

We also learned that the issue of poor "balance" of ATI RADEON 9700 PRO holds true. With 256bit DDR SDRAM memory bus, this graphics chip has "only" eight texture modules and it is the texturing speed that may become the bottleneck in certain situations. But, as the benchmarks show, ATI RADEON 9700 PRO gets definitely "out of balance" only when anisotropic filtering is enabled. In all other cases, the workload is shared evenly between the chip and the memory bus.

As to your second question, the short answer is Yes.

And now for the grand finale, the system zone temp is the case internal temp. Usually, only the CPU and Case temps are measured, after all, what other useful temps are there? [note: sometimes you might find temp readings at more than one location in your system case, hence the System Zone 1 designation]

 

[olefarte]

That's enough to let me know I don't have the knowledge nor am brave enough to do all that. I guess I'll leave well enough along on the overclocking. Thanks.

 

[Nic]

No need to panic, that review was an extreme example. Personally, I wouldn't overclock unless your card was too slow, just to prolong its usefulness prior to upgrading. Overclocking will shorten its working life so it isn't worth doing unless necessary. You can overclock by a moderate amount using overclocking utilities such as Redline, or whatever utility came supplied with your card, if any.

 

[Elcarion]

You need to make sure that the Gateway uses a standard ATX power supply. If need be, you could contact Gateway and simply ask them. All standard ATX power supplies are the same size. Some manufacturers, like Dell, tend to use proprietary PSUs that are not compatable with standard ATX.

 

[olefarte]

Thanks Elcarion, I think I saw something about it being ATX in the documentation. I'll check and see or call like you said. Thanks.