AGP Voltage

Grail

would the AGP Voltage setting in bios affect overclock performance on the ati cards? as in, would increasing the voltage help with getting a higher overclock on my card.

card: Powercolor 9800 Pro
cooler: Artic Cooling VGA Silencer v2
speed: 425/default

any higher on the core and i get mad artifacts.

The_Neon_Cowboy

sometimes it can help, becouse it can supply a little extra power if you wanna try it
the defult is 1.5V you might try 1.6 but don't try any higer! it's a very bad idea! to much can fry your card (dead/damaged card.) . though most card seem to accept 1.6V ok and some people even recomend it upping it for stabilty in certain cases..so you can try 1.6 if it doesn't help then put it back at defult!


before u askYou can also monkey with the agp clock 70mhz and under is tolerable. If you do play with it don't go over 70! too high again will end you up with a dead/damaged card. i'd reccomend leveing that setting alone!

but thouse setting are very hard on your card

as allways it's at you own risk, but i've have never done te above too things i'm not an avaid overclocker i'm just going on what i have read

BMG_Cya=-

I would have to echo what Neon said and possibly advise against it a little stronger. You will not
see a performance gain that is worth the wear and tear or possible cratering of your card and/or
mobo.

I would advise just leaving both those settings at stock. I speak from experience and by what I've
read also.

RebelWolf

Let's assume for a minute, that your PSU and Motherboard are running up to spec, so when you've selected 1.5 in the bios, that's actually what your getting, and not less volts.

From here, that power get's once again filtered by the video card itself, and then used, which is why there are all those capacitators and such on the vidcard. Now let's say you increase that voltage... What will happen, is your vidcards power regulating circuitry will simply have to work harder to once again, provide the proper power so it can be used. Needless to say, this circuitry is not all that robust on the AGP side, since it's expecting that power to be filtered twice already, once by the PSU, and once by the MB.

Adding power to the AGP port, does not mean you get more at the VPU, like a volt mod does, it just means your putting more stress on the circuits that were designed to regulate the incoming power to the vidcard.

It works the same way, as if your turning up the pot's in your PSU, to provide more power to certain rails for the motherboard. This can be a very useful thing to do, stability wise, if the volt's it was sending were off spec, but if your turning it up beyond spec, all that will happen is the MB's power regulating circuitry will do all it can to put the power back to the proper voltage (working harder, and potentially burning it up).

Hope this helps some...

RebelWolf

Grail

thanks a ton for the info. guess i won't bother playing with the agp voltage.

The_Neon_Cowboy

You welcome