hi all!!

I'm new to this forum and I think I read correctly that overclocking questions should be in the cooling and modding section.. right????

anyways, i have an old ATI Radeon9600SE. i know its a junk 64 bit card but i dont want to upgrade until i build a whole new system. for now i would like to know if i can expect any performance boost from overclocking it.

it still has the stock heatsink (with no fan) on it, i did however remove it, clean it, and reseat it with arctic sliver 5. i then placed an 80mm fan underneath it blowing up towards the heatsink from the bottom if the case (the fan is rasied up via 8-32 2 inch bolts that rasie it up about 1 inch from the case floor)

i think that will provide adequite cooling for it because i dont want to spend any money on a VGA cooler and i dont want to tap into my CPU-only water cooling rig.

I have read that it can be flashed to a 128bit interface.. is this really possible? if so, is it safe to do so?

if not, can i expect any actual improvement in performance with it being overclocked?

i play halo (yes i still play halo), COD2, F.E.A.R., DOOM3 and it plays them all fine, but i would like to turn up some bells and whistles a little more, would overclocking allow me to do that???

thanks in advance for your help, ive been a viewer of this forum for quite some time now and i have to say that you guys are awesome!!

hi mod-newbie and welcome to techspot

i have the same crappy card.. hahaha

i screwed a 40mm fan right into the heatsink, but your cooling solution is probably more effective than mine.

i tried to overclock mine with ATI tools a while ago, but it got too hot even with the fan i added and everything started to lag really bad, so i put it back to stock and never tried again.

as far as i know from everything i read before on this card, you cannot flash the BIOS to make it 128 bit, it is stuck at 64 bit and any attempt to flash the BIOS will result in a dead card.. (i never tried because of that reason)

i suppose that if you could keep it cool enough (probably need water cooling), then you could significantly overclock it, but it probably isn't worth it.

i am waiting for DX10 cards to come out before I upgrade mine so i can stay current for while (and most importantly be able to play Halo2 for PC when it comes out next year

i looked up some more on this,

i have read threads on other forums that state that updating the BIOS will render the card useless, and there will be no way to recover the original BIOS afterwards,

so do NOT attemp to flash the BIOS!!

000000000000000

You could use different drivers in windows.

Thanks for the replies, you guys are awesome! and thanks for the warm welcome king )

what would that do? and where would I get them??

it wasn't so crappy when it was new. it has serverd me well for years

lol?? what is that?? subliminal messeges in binary code?? :haha:

Hint Hint Years!!!

you would have to manully install the drivers.

not to be rude or anything but that didn't answer either question he asked you

lol...what happened is i wrote something and then i took it back but you have to have a 10 character minumum so i had to write sumthin.

ok? but again, where would I get them, and what would it change?

Well I don't want to tell him if he doesn't already know how for safty reasons to the card and windows.

I was just giving him the idea. But if you want just ask and I will tell you how.

i already asked you two times already!!! please tell me!