New drivers or overclocked?

[thedonk3]

I have a Hercules Rad 9700 (non Pro) which I was running overclocked at about 300mhz core and memory. This has worked up to Catalyst 3.4.... however the card locks up when using 3.5 or above and the system has to reboot. So now we are at Catalyst 3.8 do you think it is more beneficial performance wise to have the better drivers or the card overclocked 12% but with lower drivers? (Sorry I have not benchmarked with any drivers up to now.... maybe I should and I would get my answer)???
Any advice or comments would be appreciated.... cheers.

 

[stilup]

New drivers

Go with the new drivers, they are ausome.
They act very nice on my machine.
Most stable kicking driver set ever.
Stable enough to O/C my CPU

 

[olefarte]

I don't know if you will get a 12% performance boost, but the new drivers resolve a lot of issues that gave problems in the past, and as stilup says, they are very stable. I've got a 9700 Pro and had no problems at all. You might try the new 3.8s and see what happens. Besides, if you have XP, you could restore back to the old ones if you don't like them.

I'm trying the new Omega 3.8 Beta's now. Supposed to be a later release than the regular 3.8s, they come from Dell. I've read some people are getting perfromance boost from them, but I don't know if it's true. I can't benchmark decently, because I can't get them to set at "Performance". They want to stay on "Quality" performance, which on my computer is okay. Guess that's why they are Beta's.

The only game I've played so far with them is MOHAA: Breakthrough, and they are great, so far.

 

[stilup]

tweaker

Not recomended by Omega I use the(Rage3D) tweaker that once installed allows Omega drivers settings but also gives you the option to modify more, I do and add the AMD support and the Z-Buffer and also up the quality,high quality settings in most.
You could set to preformance but them days are history.
Quality all the way and of course stabi;ity too.
My system has never looked or run so good.