295/295, with no extra cooling. It lasts a good 4 hours before becoming unstable during intense gaming. Otherwise, it's always stable.

High instensity RTCW sessions seem to heat it up a little too much for it's teeny fan to handle Those new 6037 drivers are pretty good. Not a HUGE improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. (couple more fps it seems in RTCW)


---I have the official ATi Radeon 8500. (only $140 at all Best Buy's for the time being).

What do you guys mean when you say "going unstable"? The computer just freezes/crashes? I would like to overclock my vid card, but I read these warnings saying it could damage the hardware. That's something I don't need. I paid full retail price ($199, I think) for the card, and I don't feel like spending another bundle...

...How high can you overclock it and still be stable/safe?

yep... 5mhz increments is the way to go. And as for unstable: I start to see white artifacts in game, and eventually about (give or take) 20 minutes after that, my screen just freezes. It usually takes about 15 minutes (blatant guess) before my R8500 core is cooled down enough again to go into a heavy RTCW/MOH-AA bout without crashing.

Oh, and I have a compusa warranty on the card, so I have a backup plan if ever there's a problem.... I suggest any n00bie overclocker has a backup plan as well.

btw per hanson, read ur email m8.

...so how much does the performance improve by?

+1mhz = +10 fps ?

I'm just curious if it's worth the trouble.

in my experience, depends on the game.

but +1mhz = +10 fps is wrong. Wayyy less than that. And heck, if you're getting great fps in games now, then there's no reason to overclock & risk ruining your vidcard.


(I for one started doing it because R8500 still sucks for Unreal Tournament in the frame rate department imo)

Yes, i know. It was just a "blatant guess."

Yes, same reason here. What's the frame rate you have now? Fortunately, the next Unreal Engine will run much better (supposedly).

uhh.. it improves it a little bit. But UT is much more CPU based than graphics card based. (it was meant for fast CPUs so it could still run in software rendering mode I think).


Oh, and yes... Unreal 2 will run MUCH better with it. (know this from personal experience, and from reading some anandtech article about the new Unreal Performance test, that's made to test all the newest video cards using the Unreal 2/UT2 engine)

http://www.maxreboot.com/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1015264815,26919,


6043 drivers for the R8500

Build by ATI Radeon 8500 stable without extra cooling at 290/290. Had an increase of 200 marks in 2001 SE.

Because my system crashed during 295/295 and 292/292, I kind of broke it. I couldn't see any webpage anymore and there were visual artefacts on my windows screen.

I cannot state with certity what the cause was. My guess is the system crash (had the same problem once before), but it could be the new drivers or the overclocking.

Well... some guys at madonion have gotten their radeon's up to 300/300 with extreme cooling, but as far as i've heard, it only lasts through the bench as it begins to build up temp so fast that even the water cooling can't cool it... so i'd say 290/290 should be ok for watercooling

Radeon 8500

I have the retail 275/275 card. I have overclocked to 290/290 using powerstrip with no issues using standard cooling on the card and three case fans. I was able to get a 3dmark2001 score of 8144 with the 6043 drivers with no overclocking and 8367 with overclocking.

So how did you install the 6043 drivers? I read the threads at Rage3D and they say to...

1. Uninstall the old driver
2. Reboot
3. Start RegCleaner, check Ati Technologies - Cbt, Cds, Desktop, (leave intact - if exist - MMC, Sushi Engine, HydraVision, Multimedia), click on 'Remove Selected'
--another person said to remove all, including MMC, Sushi Engine, HydraVision, and Multimedia
4. Reboot
5. Cancel stupid MS HW Wizard and install 6043
6. Reboot
7. Enjoy!

Some of the people there couldn't start Windows after the drivers.... I don't like the sound of that. But overall, they say it's the best drivers yet for the 8500.

So how did you install the drivers?

Ati is not a good driver developer, nvidia is though

That's pretty much how I installed them. And they're LEAKED so they're not supposed to be easy to install. If you don't install it this way, not all of the OpenGL changes take effect (performance gains), and software from the old drivers will remain. If they were an easy executable, even more people would use these leaked drivers, so they just leave it as is (blatant guess ).

oh... forgot to add.

They definitely sped up Open GL in a couple games that I play, but not the supposive 40% that's being told in the threads....

prolly closer to 5% in RTCW.... not tested yet in MOH-AA though.

man... what would it be like if ATI had released the R8500 with drivers like they have now.... they'd be in such good shape instead of trailing the GF3Ti500 in sales.

haha it'd be nice to see a 40% performance increase when each driver is released, woudln't it?

why are drivers such a pain to install and uninstall?

*edited by moderator

in the butt? cuz companies don't gice too much about drivers being suuuper cool... they just make sure that one set of drivers is good enough to give them "propaganda"