Ancient 9600 needs tweaking for gaming...

StealthM0de

Hi, a friend of mine has an ancient ati radeon 9600. He has recently gotten the newest build of omegadrivers for it. I am unfamiliar with this line of graphics cards from ati. Does anyone know any settings/tweaks for the card?

Specifically, anything that would improve both opengl and direct3d for gaming? (plays cs 1.6 (opengl) and cs:source/hl2 (direct3d))

Overclocking is an option, but only slightly hes running stock fan/heatsinks. But I dont know the proper procedure for ocing an ati card.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

agenthex

First thing's first: Replace the stock heatsink. This will not only increase overclocking potential, but it will make the card run cooler.

Second, you could look into the Radeon 9600XT BIOS flash, but I'm not sure if there are enough major differences between older and newer revisions to make a flash possible. I suppose you could try, but have a PCI graphics card handy to make sure you can flash it back if something goes wrong.

CDsDontBurn

i would say that the stock cooling is sufficient enough until you start to do some extreme OCing; until then start looking into aftermarket cooling solutions. d/l a program like ATI tool to find out the max OC you can get on both core and memory.

Have you tried the latest build of the official ATI drivers? Every set launched becomes better in performance and stability (from what i've heard). The latest build of official ATI drivers are the 4.12 set, so give those a try as well.

There are alot of OCing programs out there for ATI cards. My favorite (back when i had my 9700pro) was RAGE 3D. I forget where i got it from, but there are also a lot of different programs out there to help you OC your video card.

INSTG8R

DONT flash it to a 9600XT it is a completely different core and memory setup. 9600=RV350 9600XT=RV360 if you wanna play with fire go ahead but I dont advise it. Stick to overclockin it.